Producers: Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe and Tim Cole   Director: Rungano Nyoni    Screenplay: Rungano Nyoni   Cast:  Susan Chardy, Elizabeth Chisela, Esther Singini, Henry B.J. Phiri, Norah Mwansa, Doris Naulapwa, Gillian Sakala, Carol Natasha Mwale, Loveness Nakwiza, Bwalya Chipampata, Roy Chisha, Blessings Bhamjee and Malita Mulenga   Distributor: A24

Grade: A-

Quietly simmering rage, coupled with sad resignation, suffuses Rungano Nyoni’s brilliant film about a death in the family that unearths revelations of past abuse.  But “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” goes beyond domestic tragedy to indict an entire society that codifies gender inequality and fosters the mistreatment of women.

The setting in contemporary Zambia, where Shula (Susan Chardy), recently returned from abroad, is driving home still in the outfit she donned for a costume party—a puffy suit made from a what looks like an inflated garbage bag and a headdress made of a sparkling silver helmet and dark sunglasses.  It makes her look like an alien, which she perhaps is.

Suddenly she’s taken aback and stops.  She’s noticed a body in the road and goes out to inspect it.  It’s her Uncle Fred (Roy Chisha), and after verifying that she goes back to the car and ponders.  She phones her father (Henry B.J. Phiri), who’s partying and offers worthless promises to help—closing with a request for money. She’s visited by an apparition of her younger self (Blessings Bhamjee) and by her drunken cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela), who notes that Fred seems to have dropped dead after patronizing a nearby brothel. Then they call the police to collect the body, though a scarcity of cars will delay the process.

It’s revealed that Shula and Nsansa were both sexually abused by Fred as children, and so was their younger cousin Bupe (Esther Singini), a college student who attempts suicide after making a cellphone recording accusing him of having done so.  This does not seem to come as a shock to anyone in the family.

Instead they concentrate on the necessities of the funeral, an event performed in a ritualistic form Nyoni depicts with almost agonizing precision.  The work involved is, as seems the case with all effort required in the society, left to the women, who must prepare for the descent of the extended family by making the house of Shula’s mother (Doris Naulapwa) ready for the onslaught, bringing in mattresses for the women and hauling in the food necessary to feed the crowd.  Naulapwa and those who play Shula’s aunts (Gillian Sakala, Carol Natasha Mwale, Loveness Nakwiza and Bwalya Chipampata) castigate her for failing to make an appropriate show of sadness over Fred’s demise.  They also encourage her and her cousins to keep word of Fred’s abuse to themselves.

That culture of silence, along with a presumption of female submissiveness, is even more apparent among the men seated outside.  One of the most scathing scenes in that regard comes when Shula’s trying desperately to search for Bupe, concerned she might harm herself.  But she’s interrupted by “uncles” who quietly but firmly ask her to get food for them, going so far as to specify exactly what they want.

The treatment of Shula, Nsansa and Bupe is mild, however, compared to that afforded to Chichi (Norah Mwansa), Fred’s much younger widow, who arrives, crawling on the floor in the requisite fashion.  Shula had already gone to Fred’s house to see her, and been appalled by the brood of children he left behind and the pleas of the widow’s grandmother (Malita Mulenga) for them all not to be tossed out of the place by the dead man’s family.  Now Chichi is shunned and berated for not having cared properly for her husband, accused in effect of being responsible for his death.  At a conference between the two families held as part of the funeral, Chichi tearfully describes Fred’s treatment of his family and his refusal to stop drinking and eat reasonably, but the dead man’s sisters are unmoved; and despite efforts by Chichi’s male relatives to make amends, Fred’s relatives insist that she should receive nothing from what must have been a meager estate.

What follows is a hallucinatory protest that links up with a recollection from Shula’s childhood about the unique role that the tiny guinea fowl has among native creatures in warning about predators in their midst.  It’s a closing image that some may criticize as too heavy a metaphor, but it gives Nyoni’s rueful message about the land of her birth a particularly trenchant impact.

With dialogue that’s predominantly in Bemba but frequently shits into English, this is in every respect a remarkably powerful film, deeply moving yet with surprising shafts of dark humor. The performance by Chardy is exceptional in its nuance, and while Chisela and Singini have more limited scope, they too bring their traumatized characters to vivid life.  The rest of the cast are utterly committed.  So too are the technical crew, who under Nyoni’s inspired direction create an atmosphere that’s incredibly specific in its details yet somehow universal as well.  The production design (Malin Lindholm) and costumes (Estelle Don Banda) bring an encompassing sense of place and David Gallego’s cinematography a feeling of claustrophobic intensity, while Nathan Nugent’s editing juggles the shifts from hyperrealism to surrealism dexterously and Lucrecia Dalt provides a spare, unobtrusive score.

Some will argue that Nyoni’s use of metaphor can be heavy-handed, but if that’s so, it’s a minor flaw.  The year is young, but it’s a certainty that when it closes this extraordinary film about trauma suppressed by familial and societal demands will be among its best.

Producers: Trevor Matthews, Nick Gordon, Brian Young, Andrew Morrison, Andrew Lauren and D.J. Guggenheim   Director: Brady Corbet   Screenplay: Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold   Cast: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach De Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola, Ariane Labed, Michael Epp, Jonathan Hyde, Peter Polycarpou, Maria Sand and Salvatore Sansone   Distributor: A24

Grade: A-

Actor Brady Corbet’s third film as a director can be accused of self-indulgence on the basis of running-time alone: “The Brutalist” is two hundred minutes long, not counting the fifteen-minute countdown intermission.  But the length is justified by its ambition, which, though arguably excessive, is also definitely impressive.

Essentially the film recounts the story of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jewish architect who arrives at Ellis Island after surviving Buchenwald and a harrowing journey.  (The character is inspired in part by Marcel Breuer, but shares his name with the mentally disturbed man who attacked Michelangelo’s Pietà in 1972—a well as the assumed moniker comedian Don Novello gave to the crazed author of “The Lazlo Letters” in 1977—a fact that Corbet might intend to indicate something about him.)

The skewered view of the Statue of Liberty, artfully contrived by Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley, which greets him is a foreshadowing of the episodes to follow; they conjoin Tóth’s artistic obsessions with sharp observations on the painful immigrant experience, ingrained capitalist exploitation, stultifying American classism, and vicious anti-Semitism—big issues all, and rather unwieldy when packaged together, with addenda to boot.  Yet Corbet and his cohorts make the package compelling from beginning to end, in addition to being perpetually relevant.

In immigrating Tóth has had to leave behind his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), a journalist who was sent to Dachau and is now trapped in a displaced persons camp under Soviet control.  She is able to inform him, however, that she’s safe with his orphaned niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy).  She does not mention that she’s confined to a wheelchair after her internment, and Zsófia mute as a result of hers; and arranging their coming to America is riddled with hurdles.

László, whose background as a Bauhaus student and noted Hungarian architect means nothing in the New World, is taken in by his Americanized cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who’d converted to Catholicism in marrying shiksa Audrey (Emma Laird).  They run a small furniture firm in Philadelphia, and employ him as a designer, even giving him a room in their apartment.  Attila is also instrumental in securing him a job redesigning a library in the Van Buren mansion outside the city in nearby Doylestown, a commission arranged as a surprise gift for their father by Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) and his sister Maggie (Stacy Martin), the children of commanding Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), to be completed while their father is away with his ill mother.

But things far apart for László.  Attila throws him out after Audrey falsely accuses him of accosting her.  And though he and Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), the single father he met at a shelter, begin work on the Van Buren commission, when Harrison returns to find his home in disarray he’s furious, tosses them out and refuses to pay for the work, noting in particular the destruction of a ceiling dome.  László and Gordon are reduced to doing crushing manual labor; they mitigate their pain with heroin.

Another change of fortune occurs after several years, though, when Harrison, an aesthete of sorts, seeks out László after the library in his mansion has been acclaimed by experts as a minimalist masterpiece and its creator as a genius.  Paying him his due, Harrison introduces him to his social circle as a sort of prized possession and offers him a larger commission, to design and build a grand community center on a peak near Doylestown.  As an additional incentive, he has his lawyer (Peter Polycarpou) use his influence to arrange the release of László’s wife and niece for admission to the United States.  They arrive in 1953, and László is shocked by their infirmities.  

But Harrison’s patronage is charged with the arrogance fed by wealth, privilege, and the superiority of class and race, and he seeks to impose his own views, and concerns about cost, on László’s monumental vision.  The situation is further enflamed by Harry Lee’s bitter, bigoted hostility and his unwanted attentions toward Zsófia.  The project is ultimately suspended in one of Harrison’s sudden rages and László reduced to taking a menial office job with a New York architectural firm.  Zsófia, who has been living with the Tóths, weds a Zionist, and they move to Israel.

Some years later, Harrison contacts László with an offer to resume work on the building.  Despite misgivings he agrees and throws himself back into construction.  But when the two men travel to Carrara, Italy, to choose a block of marble for the center, they get drunk with László’s friend Orazio (Salvatore Sansone), and when László is defenseless Harrison assaults him in a show of dominance and contempt.  Yet László’s commitment to the project continues, despite his emotional unravelling.  So devoted is he to completing it as he wishes that he’ll not allow Harrison’s intrusions, changes proposed by the project managers and the quibbles of the local community to deter him; he even places his own salary on the line as a guarantee.  The intense stress leads to a meltdown in his relationship with Gordon and friction with Erzsébet, whom he unwisely tries to cure with the opioids he continues to take. 

When Erzsébet learns of Harrison’s abuse of her husband, an act of dark defilement committed against the pristine white of Carrara’s marble fields, she confronts the mogul in front of his family, even abandoning her chair to do so standing up.  While Harry reacts with fury, his father abruptly disappears into the monumental center László has built despite all the obstacles arrayed against him.

In an epilogue set at the first architecture section of the Venice Biennale in 1980, Zsófia offers a speech about her uncle, now an infirm man himself wheelchair-bound.  In it she explains why he was so intent on building the Brutalist-style community center for which he is being honored according to his very specific vision.  The secret lies in his own past.

This scenario, though intimate in terms of its characters, is a wide-ranging tapestry of issues that were critical in the American history of the second half of the twentieth century, and are still so today.  There is, to be sure, as much an intellectualized structuring to the screenplay as there is to Tóth’s building, but Corbet and Fastvold succeed in adding intense personal emotion to their plot’s scaffolding, and the cast embody it brilliantly.

It’s most notable in Brody’s overpowering turn as the obsessed architect, capturing his despair, hope and maniacal fixation in equal measure.  But he’s matched by Pearce, whose mixture of suave elitism and malignant egotism makes Van Buren a truly horrifying portrait of American hubris.  Jones is no less compelling as the defiant Erzsébet, stronger than her husband in spite of her osteoporosis, and Alwyn is the very personification of bigoted swagger.  Though none of the others have a similar opportunity to shine, all contribute to Corbet’s carefully plotted scenario under his tautly nuanced direction.

Technically the film is a visual marvel, with Judy Becker’s production design and Kate Forbes’s costumes evoking time and place superbly within the confines of a tightly managed budget.  Crawley, shooting in the near-obsolete VistaVision process, fashions outdoor tableaux of shimmering beauty and interiors that are rich and opulent.  And while David Jancso’s editing, in line with Corbet’s demands, hardly hurries things along, it deserves to be called lapidary in terms of its elegance and precision.  But the film is no less remarkable for its appeal to the ear: the sound design by Steve Single and Andy Neil is no less impressive, and Daniel Blumberg’s score, which draws one into the story with its insistently intoxicating strains.

“The Brutalist” is, of course, the second American epic about an architect to emerge this year, a young man’s expansive vision as compared to an equally ambitious one from a master veteran filmmaker.  But while Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” was an extravagant mess of half-baked ideas, Corbet’s film is a coherent statement of its themes—perhaps a bit too tidily constructed, in fact.  But a comparison to the alternative makes any design flaws pale into insignificance.