Machel Montano was the star of Bazodee (directed by Todd Kessler and written by Claire Ince). People went to the cinema to see the “Machel Movie.” The film highlighted the vivid colours of the natural landscape of Trinidad and Tobago. It also portrayed ethnic solidarities/“real unity” between Afro- and Indo-Trinbagonians on screen. This solidarity is sometimes undermined by harmful stereotypes and antagonisms between the two majority ethnic groups. The film does not show the depth of these wounds, instead it shows a story of something “inside ah all ah we,” essential to Trinidad and Tobago people that looks beyond cultural differences. What made the film interesting was not its assignment to show how ‘Trini culture’ and music have the potential to unite people; rather the film illustrates our attachment to narratives of “unity” and “disunity” in our society.
I watched the film in the company of five bredren at Trincity Mall’s Cinemas 8. On social media, opinions about the film were divided – “de best film eva” or “nah nah nah nah nah nah Machel.” As someone who writes and teaches on Caribbean popular culture, the thought of missing a film produced by and starring the leading soca artiste who has gone well beyond the title of “Mr. Fete” to become “Mr. Carnival” was impossible.
Machel Montano, with the exception of the infamous “Wild Antz” music video, has developed a long career of excellence in live performances and he has been ahead of the curve in music video production standards. Years of well-produced spectacles, in film and concert productions like Machel Monday, set the expectation levels high for the film. Additionally, coming out of a general election only one year ago, the country welcomed cultural productions about unity as a “breath of fresh air.” And maybe, just maybe, for us in Trinidad and Tobago, the success of MultiSymptom’s “Sonita,” a reggae-chutney romance story, proclaiming a male Afro-Trinidadian’s unrequited love (for a woman named Sonita who “make the sada”), assisted in pre-conditioning the market to the Bazodee film which follows a similar portrayal.
Bazodee is the story of the trials related to the relationship entanglements of Anita Ponchouri (Natalie Perera), daughter of an upper class Indo-Trinidadian family. While the family appears to have a stable class position, beneath the surface, Anita’s father, the businessman, is submerged in debt. In a series of fortuitous events, soca singer Lee de Leon (Machel Montano) performs at Anita’s engagement party for her and her London-based fiancé. Anita and Lee develop an attraction for each other, later expressing their desires for each other at j’ouvert. Anita, conflicted between the marriage to her fiancé and the romantic adventurism with Lee de Leon, ultimately chooses Lee as her lover.
From the beginning of the movie, yuh start slow wine in your seat when you hear the j’ouvert anthem “Water Flowing” leading us through the well-shot visuals of Trinidad and Tobago on screen. An entire film based on the #1 songs of Machel Montano’s catalogue is enough to send the nation back down memory lane and feel good moments. However, plot predictability, flat characters and repeated contrived efforts at humour for a local (Trinbagonian) audience made the film’s story telling and acting difficult to hold up as a standard-bearer.
There was subplot too: The Story of a Ukulele in a Violin Case.
From the magical inter-splicing of Drupatee’s voice in Machel Montano’s nation-building soca “Real Unity” played on on a ukulele to Anita’s auto-tune rendition of “One More Time” in the party that gave T-Pain a sore throat…The laughter during and after the film was endless.
In the film, there was a representation of the harsh realities soca artistes endure in the industry. Lee De Leon, under economic hardship, turned to construction labour, mixing cement doing “an honest black man’s work” soon after he had a leading song for the carnival season. This is an Ash Wednesday reality for many.
I have friends who viewed the movie three times in the cinema. Why the love? A lot of the history of Trinidad and Tobago is decontextualised in the film; the film tells us there is a mystic power of carnival that heals all wounds. It is the Trinidad and Tobago (“the deserted island”) that we want to believe in. Anita is a young Indian woman who feels confined by the choices of her family’s expectations. The film shows the expression of a young Indo-Trinidadian woman who wants to develop her own ideas about gender ideals, career choices, types of family and more pointedly, types of attraction. Here, Lee De Leon, played by Machel Montano, represents a vehicle for that choice, through his performance of Afro-Trinidadian masculinity. The film is centred on the pursuit of a kind of freedom by an Indo-Trinidadian female lead. At its core, she is rejecting the prescribed cultural ideals of her family, disavowing a future of marriage to a wealthy Indian man. How are ethnic groups represented in film? What narratives are being represented? Whose gaze(s) influence and inform production?
In many ways, the film produces a representation of Afro-Trinidadian masculinity and its social power in a creolised future and freedom. These representations, however, are not treated with the complexity of history, cultural identity formations and ethnic hierarchies.
The intended audience for the film was directed to the Indian/South Asian diaspora. The film was about Trinidad and Tobago and not necessarily for Trinidad and Tobago. This is part of Machel Montano’s global vision for taking soca to the world. The recruitment of Bollywood actors and actresses for the cast and the Bollywood aesthetic from beginning to end set the direction of the film for the international film circuit. Machel Montano and others while yearning for ‘quality’ local film are trapped in global frame that cast a cinematic gaze that exoticises the Caribbean and produces actors attempting to
speaking properly ” in an English that sometimes sounded strange to a Trinidad and Tobago audience.
’Bazodee adds to the stock of Trinidad and Tobago cinema, along with God Loves the Fighter (2013, directed by Damian Marcano), new films with the “international look” and “globally ready” production.
This film experience was perfect for the ethnographer, taking notes of people talking and singing back at the screen in the cinmea. The fact of the matter is that there was no time we believed we were watching the fictional character “Lee De Leon.” We were watching the king of soca, our beloved Machel Montano acting as Machel Montano in the Machel Movie. I encourage everyone to watch the film in the company of family and friends. Laugh and sing along, wine on de seat and big up a soca artiste for trying to blow things up for our twin island republic.
Aap jaisa koi
I really enjoyed your review. After seeing the trailer a few times I decided against seeing the movie as seemed more like an extended music video that an actual movie. It missed the wow factor that would make me want to see more.
An excellent post. Without the slightest shred of evidence to support it, however, let me suggest that ‘foreigners’ are no more guilty of exoticising the Caribbean than we are. Even a superficial reading of the long-running debate on how to ‘sell’ the Caribbean, de cultcha, de music has reposed largely on how best to tailor the ‘product’, yes, that is what they call it, to the outside. A substantial effort is put into projecting an image that responds to a Caribbean perception of what people outside the Caribbean expect of the Caribbean. Check out the relationship between the costumes used in early Hollywood films about the Caribbean, including Trinidad, and the popularity of nightclub performers’ costumes in Port of Spain in the 1940s and 1950s. Which costumes came first? It would seem that local nightclub managers and their employees appeared to believe that they needed to imitate the Cuban rhumba costumes popularized by US film productions.