‘Restless City’ is a Harlem with dreamy, vivid backdrop
Dosunmu is a Nigerian music-video director — he’s made videos for Maxwell, Angie Stone, Tracy Chapman, and Common. And all he’s done here is apply the same smoothness at feature length. The absurdly prolific Nigerian film industry is called Nollywood, and Gussenhoven’s story could easily have hailed from one of those flimsy, budgetless entertainments. But Dosunmu is not the average Nigerian director. His film has the alluring thinness of old French movies and the throbbing vividness of oldish American ones. I see a lot of what he accomplishes with rhythm, depth of field, and color saturation and think about Hype Williams, the iconic music-video director, whose only film — a blaxploitationish crime drama from 1998 called “Belly” — has managed to linger in the imaginations of other filmmakers. Not because it’s good (it isn’t) but because the imagery has the indelibility of body ink.
Category: Nollywood
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