European Films

Nigerian-born UK writer-director Kevin Aduaka contrasts two subsequent stories about acquired identities in his feature debut Elvis Pelvis. At once mutually exclusive and intrinsically linked by the main character and a father figure, Aduaka’s feature also reflects on such diverse topics as the inevitability of the death of our fathers but not of our heroes, the cultural influence of the US on the rest of the world and the impossibility to really know oneself or one’s close relatives. A delirious stylistic collage of saturated colour footage, stark black and white sequences and split screens never feels overly arty for arty’s sake, instead underlining the idea that transformations or other ways of looking at the same problems might in the end still prove to be insufficient and a more mystical dimension might be needed to attain peace. Festivals such as the Forum section where it premieres here in Berlin and adventurous arthouse distributors should give Elvis Pelvis a look.

 

In part one, The Suit, Derek is a young boy whose father loves Elvis so much he wish his son could be more like him. On Derek’s birthday, he gets an Elvis suit, which, if the Jimi Hendrix posters on his bedroom wall are anything to go by, is not what the little one was hoping for. Some men would like their son-in-laws to be different and this results in a major family crisis; what if your own son cannot measure up to the King? This is a battle for survival between normal people hiding behind icons, letting themselves be defined by their heroes to such an unhealthy extent it is destined to end badly.

In the second part, The Messiah, a young man who also has Jimi Hendrix posters on his wall finds an older blind man whom he starts to call father. The man soon asks him to help him with an important task. Here Aduaka opts for many sequences in black and white, which are edited together in a rhythm in which the fade outs and fade ins from and to black are just as important as the images themselves. Combined with the short, super 8-like shots that are sprinkled through The Suit, Aduaka here seems to create a canvas in a way reminiscent of Van Gogh: with daubs of colours and shapes that are more about the emotion and soul of the objects portrayed than any photographic reality.

The latter part of The Messiah could have used some trimming to make the whole work tighter and more balanced (at present The Messiah is the longer of the two sections by about 15 minutes). The Suit could work well as a stand-alone item as well, though The Messiah’s force is largely derived from its metacommentary on and implicit parallels with The Suit. As Elvis Pelvis, the two together prove Aduaka's talent for rummaging around in difficult themes in a thorougly cinematic way.

This film was screened as part of the 2007 Berlin Film Festival. 

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