NR

Runtime: 1 Hr and 31 Minutes

Production Companies: Foregone Film PSC, Fit Via Vi Film Productions, Lucky 13 Productions, Ottocento Films, SIPUR, Vested Interest

Distributor: Kino Lorber

Director: Paul Schrader

Writer: Paul Schrader

Cast: Richard Gere, Jacob Elordi, Uma Thurman, Victoria Hill, Michael Imperioli, Penelope Mitchell, Kristine Froseth

Release Date: December 6, 2024

A still from ‘Black’
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Tamil cinema’s tryst with high-concept thrillers is as rare as the occurrence of the Supermoon in Black — the new Jiiva and Priya Bhavani Shankar-starrer. The mind-bending thriller takes an intriguing concept and with able performers at the core, does a neat job of emulating the thrilling moments of Coherence, the 2013 Hollywood film on which it’s based.

In Black, Jiiva and Priya play Vasanth and Aranya, a couple who decide to chill at their newly constructed row-house villa within a gated community. But before the duo reaches the location where most of the film unfolds, we are told how back in 1964, a time-based strange occurrence happened during a supermoon. Unsurprisingly, the incomprehensible event occurs again and with no one to help, Vasanth and Aranya have to fight through what seems to defy the very law of time and physics as we know it.

With just two actors populating the majority of runtime, and almost the whole story evolving within the confines of a house in a gated community, the trump card of Black is how intriguing it is from start to finish. With scenes looping multiple times and considering the repeated sequences will have more scenes than what was shown the first time around, Black needed a strong technical team and debutant director KG Balasubramani pulls it off quite neatly along with cinematographer Gokul Benoy and editor Philomin Raj. The well-written screenplay neatly unfurls the questions in our minds even as the unravelling could have benefitted from better spacing.

After a series of shots establishing the personalities of Vasanth and Aranya, the relationship the couple shares and two annoying, unmerited songs, Black shifts to top gear the moment the couple occupy their new house. The film slowly amps up the thrills as the story progresses and despite having only two primary characters (unlike its source material), Black manages to keep us at the edge of our seats for the most part.

While the first half unravels at a break-neck speed, it’s in the second half where the shortcomings come in full view. There’s a scene where Vasanth, out of frustration, leaves his house dishevelled only for cops to think it has something to do with his missing wife. Though it might have felt like an organic scene while writing, it’s anything but that visually. The film’s most interesting aspect is the effect of the supermoon and how it casts a pitch-black force field within which our protagonists get trapped. Akin to a black hole, this field is so powerful that even light can’t reflect and acts as a portal to different timelines.

A still from ‘Black’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

But the explanation to this comes at the fag end of the film and while it can be brushed aside as a writing choice, this results in a buttload of exposition with terms like super-positioning and parallel reality to urban legends like the Bermuda triangle and thought experiments like Schrödinger’s cat thrown at us. While it might not hinder the experience of those accustomed to films on time-travel paradoxes, the references certainly overstay their welcome without much explanation to those alien to these concepts.

What makes it easy to look past these minor flaws, apart from the strong technical team, is the performance of the lead cast. While Jiiva makes a splendid comeback after a string of misses with a role that feels tailor-made for him, Priya scores in an equally important role as someone who asks the right questions to decipher the happenings to the audience without succumbing to the generic thriller trope of being the damsel in distress.

Despite reminding us of a slew of films and series on similar lines, Black does justice to the genre without taking its viewers for granted and spoon-feeding information. While the lack of a simplified explanation might be a common criticism, that’s what makes Black — along with titles like the Kannada film Blink which came out this year — stand apart from other films that lose their essence by challenging the audience’s intellect. A gripping screenplay, able performers and a strong technical crew, accentuate this well-written thriller; and Black manages to surpass its shortcomings and leaves us wishing we don’t have to wait for another supermoon for such flicks.

Black is currently running in theatres

In these trying days of super-storms and political peril, we have to celebrate wherever we can. And the reopening of the Mark Taper Forum is reason to break out in civic cheer.

Snehal Desai, Center Theatre Group’s galvanizing new artistic leader, is making his directorial debut with the company in a new production of “American Idiot,” the rock opera based on Green Day’s multiplatinum concept album. A co-production with Deaf West Theatre, the revival features a cast of deaf and hearing actors singing and signing their way through this pop-punk musical explosion of suburban angst and cultural alienation.

When I reviewed the 2009 world premiere at Berkeley Rep, I declared that the show “does what rock bands have set out to do from the beginning — lay down a style that defines a new zeitgeist.” “American Idiot” took a risk in borrowing a music video format to critique a sensationalizing, oversaturated media culture that made it difficult to feel, never mind think.

The book by Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong and Michael Mayer, the musical’s original director, stitched together story fragments taken from the 2004 “American Idiot” album and supplemented them with material from the band’s 2009 recording, “21st Century Breakdown.” The setting was the tumultuous early aughts, after 9/11 set the country reeling and President George W. Bush drummed us into war with Iraq.

Strange to say, but this awful period seems almost quaint by comparison with our current discord. “American Idiot” railed against the background noise of cable news. Today, we have TikTok rewiring our brains. Bush promoted what he euphemistically called “compassionate conservatism.” After losing his bid to retain the presidency, Donald Trump called for angry mobs to “fight like hell” or you won’t “have a country anymore.”

When I heard that the Taper was going to reopen with a new take on “American Idiot” right before the fraught 2024 presidential election, it sounded like perfect timing. We could all use an excuse to vent our anger and anxiety, and Green Day’s stylishly brash songwriting provides just the right outlet.

What I didn’t expect was to find the musical so dated. The story of three young suburban wastrels looking for a way out of the American capitalist wasteland struck me as a luxury we can’t really afford at this hinge moment in history.

My unexpected reaction stems from Desai’s misguided production. The music’s urgency is generalized into a blur. Instead of definition, the staging gives us a muddle of free-floating feeling.

I have previously been bowled over by Deaf West’s ability to find new expressive life in familiar musicals. “Big River” established the company’s musical bona fides. I was ultimately bewitched by the 2009 Deaf West-CTG revival of “Pippin” and was completely seduced by Michael Arden’s 2015 revival of “Spring Awakening” at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, before the company took it to Broadway.

But this new “American Idiot” seems at cross-purposes with itself. The staging lacks both synergy and focus. The casting of deaf and hearing actors — one to embody and emotionalize a character, the other to sing, speak and jam — fails to harmonize into a resonant or even intelligible interpretation. Our attention is splintered. The result is busy, breathless and barren.

Otis Jones IV, left, Ali Fumiko Whitney and James Olivas in Green Day’s “American Idiot” at the Mark Taper Forum.

(Jeff Lorch)

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There’s a serious casting problem at the heart of this revival. Daniel Durant, who was in the Deaf West production of “Spring Awakening,” takes on the lead role of Johnny, one of three friends desperate to escape the small, aimless, conformist world choking the life out of them. The role anchors a show that is more a collection of scenarios than a clearly delineated story. It’s essential, for this reason, that the actor playing the part can fill in what’s missing and become the musical’s compelling center.

Tony Award-winner John Gallagher Jr. from “Spring Awakening,” who played Johnny at Berkeley Rep and subsequently on Broadway, brought star power to this modern-day druggy rebel struggling to name his cause. Durant turns Johnny into a disheveled drifter. His performance made me imagine what the very fine actor Michael Cera might be like as David Berkowitz in a TV movie about the Son of Sam serial killer. I suspect that’s not quite what Armstrong and Mayer were going for in their book.

What makes this casting choice more puzzling is that Milo Manheim sings and plays guitar with a rock god’s swagger as the Voice of Johnny. The contrast with Durant’s lumpish Johnny makes no sense. Why cast a hearing actor with tremendous charisma next to a deaf actor who is made out (in costuming, grooming and general deportment) to be a schlub? There are other ways to get at inner conflicts without sacrificing theatrical magnetism.

The scenes with Johnny and his buddies are handled in a perfunctory manner that made it hard for me to invest in their plights or paths. Otis Jones IV’s Will, the character whose plans to run off with Johnny are upended by his girlfriend’s pregnancy, and Landen Gonzales’ Tunny, who chooses the military route as his answer only to be seriously wounded in combat, are treated almost as spectral presences, insubstantial and more or less tangential.

Daniel Durant, center, and the cast of Green Day’s “American Idiot” at the Mark Taper Forum.

(Jeff Lorch)

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I kept trying to locate where Manheim, James Olivas (as the Voice of Will) and Brady Fritz (as the Voice of Tunny) were singing. This has not been my experience with Deaf West musicals in the past. This sense of dispersion, directly attributable to the casting and the direction, is only compounded by Takeshi Kata’s two-tiered, standard-issue industrial musical set

Jennifer Weber’s jumpy choreography doesn’t enhance the storytelling picture. I did appreciate David Murakami’s projection design. One video image of a highway at night was more eloquent than anything in the lead-up to Johnny’s Greyhound getaway.

The music, thankfully, fills the theatrical breach. The orchestra, discreetly visible on the set’s upper level, brings out the vibrancy of Tom Kitt’s arrangements and orchestrations. And the singing is glorious. Mars Storm Rucker as Whatsername, the girl Johnny shoots heroin with for the first time, seismically delivers the character’s emotionally vehement numbers. Mason Alexander Park brings a David Bowie-ish quality to St. Jimmy, Johnny’s fiendish drug dealer.

“American Idiot,” the show’s opening number, still rouses an audience with a mad-as-hell anthem that is as valid today as it was 20 years ago when the album came out. The head-bobbing in the audience made me wonder what a dance-party version of the musical might be like, something akin to the immersive staging of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s “Here Lies Love.”

But that’s probably asking too much from a theater just getting back on its feet. The good news is that the Taper is open again. Being there again, even with all these criticisms, felt deeply satisfying.