On Film: Hurray for Valleywood September 2020
What happens when a mainlander watches a 90-minute Trini narrative film, without subtitles? One can only be thankful that it is an action-adventure.
My friend Antony considers Welcome to Warlock: Land of the Lawless, 2014, to be the best film ever to come out of Trinidad. It meets the bill, featuring a compelling story and sympathetic characters, but with mostly indecipherable dialogue. However, the morality tale captivates a Trini audience particularly because it rings so true.
Described by its creator Jeffrey Alleyne as “run and gun from the trenches,“ it is shot with a bouncing hand-held device, like a war zone documentary, during which our taxi-driving protagonist traces my old Saturday commute to Valley Harp Panyard. The ghetto cinematography is crude—“without a crew, without a script, without a budget,“ as the promotional teaser boasts. The ad hoc cast of actors are from these very streets of D’ego Martin. They neither need lines to recite nor moves to copy, for they have been rehearsing the parts their whole lives. The unhappy ending is completely expected, as is the film’s limited exposure. Self-produced, self-consumed, even ravenously—with thin greasy bones of roti yardbirds a-flying—such is the island.
Some may see Welcome to Warlock as Trinidad’s attempt at The Harder They Fall, the Jimmy Cliff classic from Jamaica, and the two films do share superficial similarities—the grimy green lushness, the dense colloquial speech, the class consciousness, the poverty and corruption—but gone are those sunny days when You Could Get It If You Really Wanted. The extended dancehall scene in Warlock is tired and superfluous, its importance to the director evident only through its interminable length. The songs grind rather than elevate. The lime only marks the anxious pause before it is time once again to “run and gun from the trenches.“ At the heart of The Harder They Fall was some heroic myth, but there are no underdog heroes in Welcome to Warlock, only victims and survivors. The myth rots like a fallen mango, replaced with a nihilistic favela chic.
“Dey got it right,“ says Deon, an admirer of all films about Trini’s, by Trini’s, and for Trini’s. Indeed, the cautionary tale fits any recent Newsday headline: “De child-run make one bad choice, and it leads to de next.“ It thus becomes critical that the lesson is one of calamity. Deon hopes the young ones will learn, but, unfortunately, they already may have.
Consider the top 4 common surnames in Trinidad: Muhammed, Ali, Joseph, Williams. Two of these are owned by God, the other two by men with first names that became last names, breeding a sense of injury and indignation. Jeffrey Alleyne’s camera chases Raphael Joseph from his Maxi minivan through the narrow-ways of Petit Valley, re-christened Valleywood. Here he finds the inevitable dead end. The focus comes and goes, from the urban jungle backdrops to the crumbling pastel limestone homes. At a low entrance, we drop our heads like bystanders crouching for cover.
Even today Valleywood still skirts the frontera of lawlessness, where the bush meets the city, controlled by a mob called City of Rastafari, whose lordship resides in a stucco villa with a Spanish-style roof, although you will not see this on film. Not if Mister Alleyne is careful. The big house sits near the top of a hill directly across from the old cement quarry. Below, at the bend of the Morne Coco Alley, Mama Elaine cooks up chickpea channa for her Doubles under a tarp, while Gero medicates a hangover with a bottle of Mauby root, behind the locked chainlink gates of the Valley Harp Panyard. Police will stay away until it is time to clean up the graphic aftermath, in the wake of some arbitrary justice, administered by armed youngsters, killed or captured, with a hand-held device. Deon mourns the state of things—“dis reel is too real“—but, like the lone filmmaker, he understands it is important to bear witness.