In an audacious stroke, Raoul Peck claims Alexander Sokurov’s Moloch as his own. Transplanting the Russian director’s unsettling mountain idyll between Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun from Bavaria to the green heat of Haiti, Peck tucks a searing critique of absolute power within the most elegant chamber drama. It’s a masterful move.
As it happens, Haiti has a castle even more impressive than Sokurov’s, high atop a mountain outside Port-au-Prince. Built from massive stone blocks that seem to rise up out of the jungle, it is a remnant of colonial power and debauchery hiding in the mists. Peck uses this setting to increasingly shattering effect.
It is from this height that the President rules. Styling himself an imperial monarch, he rattles paranoid around the enormous castle, as isolated and fragile as one of Shakespeare’s mad kings. Obsessed equally with what the television tells him and the comely shape of his new maid, he enforces rules with an erratic terror common to many despots.
There is without doubt a coiled rage within Moloch Tropical, but it releases its critique with tremendous discipline. The President jails and tortures a dissident journalist, then dresses him up and invites him to his dinner table. He prepares for a visit by international diplomats, insisting that he needs a white face in the picture to give his rule legitimacy. Instead of scattergun satire, Peck introduces with each scene a growing sense of quiet absurdity.
Even without reference to Haiti’s recent history, Moloch Tropical stands as a major work that synthesizes political analysis, symbolic art and a particularly Caribbean approach to tragedy. It may be worth remembering that, in addition to directing landmark works of diasporic African cinema – Lumumba: La Mort du prophète, Sometimes in April – Raoul Peck also once served as Haiti’s minister of culture. —tiff.net
