It’s difficult to write about a movie that shook you emotionally. How not to be biased? How to do justice to it? Every word seems inadequate, each sentence useless, every reflection banal and shallow. In front of a great piece of art, it’s probably better to keep quiet. Therefore, this article shouldn’t even exist. To describe Sing by US American director Greg Kwedar feels like an impossible task. Does it even make sense to write about something that is mostly about a sensorial fruition: feeling the people in the space, that of a maximum-security prison? This drama, produced by A24, is a profound enactment of hardship and tenderness. Unlike most of the previously done movies on the topic, Sing Sing is about co-creating and setting free, metaphorically and literally. An aspect also mirrored in its ethical production model, where everyone on set was paid the same wage. Premiered in 2023 at the 48th Toronto Film Festival it is now a candidate to the Golden Globes in most categories.
Divine G (Colman Domingo) is a key member of the theatre group of the Sing Sing prison. He not only usually plays the main character in the shows, but he is also a sort of co-facilitator. He supports the director (Paul Raci) during the rehearsals, recruits new actors, and writes original plays. For the upcoming production, Divine G insists on scouting Divine Eye (Clarence Maclin), despite the skepticism of his good friend Mike Mike (Sean San José). Divine Eye, in fact, is sadly known around the facility for his unleashed rage and his brutality in collecting debts from his co-convicts. However, despite a rough takeoff, the two divines get closer. They grow into each other, at points sovrapposing and almost swapping places, in a sort of role-play which is the mystery of intimate relationships. Their specular names, confusing at first, acquire meaning throughout the development of the movie. The spectator gets a sense of the state of alienation, people face daily in correction facilities, especially when they are unjustly detente, as in the case of Divine G.
Sing Sing is performed by an exceptional cast. Colman Domingo, nominated by Time among the 100 most influential people of 2024, leads the cast after his breakthrough in the HBO series Euphoria. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Domingo emphasised what he sees as the exceptionality of Sing Sing, compared to other movies of the genre: “That we’re showing radical love between Black and Brown men which is not typical. That was something very important to me. This is a part of our healing and our liberation for ourselves and our mental health— to feel soft, to feel vulnerable, and to smash tropes of toxic masculinity that we’re raised with”. Another peculiarity of Sing Sing is that some of the actors like Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin play themselves as alumni of Rehabilitation Through the Arts. RTA is a US federal program aimed at creating a community among convicted, through performative arts. A similar story, also shot with former inmates performing Shakespeare while reenacting some of their life’s traumas, has been already told in the movie Cesaer Must Die (Cesare deve morire) by the Taviani brothers. It’s not clear if Sing Sing is a remake or an homage to Tavian’s movie, certainly not a coincidence since the Italian production reached international fame by winning the Golden Bear at the 62nd Berlinale in 2012. In Ceaser Must Die, like in Sing Sing, there is a constant wonder, a negotiation between truth and fiction. Of what the protagonists are inside and outside, what they were and are now becoming, and most of all, what they want to be. Both movies are bout the art’s ontological power to change people and the prison becomes a character in itself.
Being inside a circumscribed space is constantly perceived throughout Sing Sing. Director Kwedar however, managed to bring it across in an original and poetic way. The dedication of DOP Pat Scola certainly helps. The photography is delicate, in the brutalist spaces of the correction facilities where Sing Sing has been filmed, on a 16 mm film in an arch of only nineteen shooting days. The close-ups are never intrusive. A constant reminder of confinement is the alternation, sometimes abrupt and unforeseeable, of the in and the outside, the focus on natural and artificial borders, on lines and perimeters: rivers, fences, windows, doors, gates, walls, woods, courtyards, horizontal signs. Domingo confirmed the importance of the space in Sing Sing and how it influenced his performance: “A decommissioned prison lent to the rawness of performance because you didn’t have to create in your mind so much. You didn’t have to do that work. The air quality did the work for you. The size of the cells did that work for you. The fact that you can’t tell which way is north when you’re walking through the halls did that for you. There are certain things you just have to lean in as a performer and something really raw and honest is going to happen because you’re actually in that environment”.
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