One of the highlights of Cannes this year was running into my old friend, director Jean Stéphane Sauvaire, whom I had not seen in seven years—-and whose new film “A Prayer Before Dawn” had just amazed me.
“A Prayer Before Dawn” is based on the true story of a British boxer who was incarcerated in a Thai prison and suffered intense alienation, violence and drug addiction—before picking himself up and learning how to box like the locals. What makes the film gripping is how Jean Stéphane uses documentary authenticity, set, color, and choreography to immerse us in the Thai prison experience. We are constantly with the near-naked prisoners as they move, as if in a dance, around the crowded cells, their bodies glorious with muscles and tattoos, palpable with inner tension. Most of the “actors” are actually former prisoners—murderers, drug dealers and boxers—whose bodies express the hidden stories they do not share.
Jean Stéphane’s eye is unusual in that he films the experience at the margins as an intimate, with complicity and respect. There is no judgement on the sudden scenes of violence, including sodomy at the toilets and bloody punching in the courtyard. Instead, the camera expresses the beauty and dignity of these men smoldering with vitality and frustration, behind bars.
What I most liked: the visceral experience of alienation that Sauvaire creates through the senses. We are anguished with Billy as he crouches by himself, trying to get solace by smoking meth, listening to the chains, grunts and clanks around him in this foreign environment.
We route for him as he makes steps to find a way out.
I met Jean Stéphane under an umbrella in the rain by the Croisette---and with his great infectious laugh, he explained to me that his passion for the project led him to spend months in Thailand and in the Philippines, and that he had shot the movie in an old abandoned Thai prison, with his team of local non-professional actors. “It’s like Johnny Mad Dog,” he told me, speaking of his previous award-winning fiction film about child soldiers, which also used non-professional local actors on location: in that instance, escaped child soldiers in Liberia.
In “Johnny Mad Dog”, the two child protagonists escape and find love. In “A Prayer Before Dawn”, the tormented Billy Moore becomes a champion of Muay Thai Boxing---and ultimately leaves the prison, to be greeted with acceptance—in a meaningful twist---by the real Billy himself.
“It’s a story of spiritual redemption,” Jean Stéphane said glowing happily.
It is actually not surprising that under Jean Stéphane’s camera, even an agonizing story of incarceration has a creative positive finale. For Jean Stéphane’s own modus operandi is perseverance and creative triumph.
“The last time I saw you, you had just bought an old abandoned mansion in Brooklyn, to make a film of Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles,” I said.
“Oh that film never came through!” Jean Stéphane said with a laugh.
So instead he transformed that dilapidated house into his dream.
A club for wild and bizarre theatrical acts, replete with restaurant and bar----and—on the top floor—his home.
“The Bushwick Bizarre” it’s called.
Every week there are live performances—with evocative titles like “The Circus Of Dreams” and "Assorted Madness and the Unexpected".
So two weeks later in New York, I took the train to Brooklyn, with my great friend Cato, who had just got his doctorate in physics from NYU, to discover what Sauvaire means by bizarre.
As we walked into the crowded bar, with young people sitting on the floor and at tables, we saw a cross-dressed big woman (or man?), with an exuberant comic voice, doing a parody of a strip tease to enthusiastic cheers.
The originality, courage and openness of these cross-dressed young performers—one by one sharing the pains of gender exclusion and longings for love---created an intimate bond with the spectators, much as does one of Jean Stephane’s films.
“Come!” said Jean-Stephane, with a warm embrace, leading me and Cato up a long flight of dark steps to the upper floors.
His home was as extraordinarily surprising and full of vivid color as his films. In the guest room, the bed was inhabited by two smiling masks of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on the pillows, facing a tilted smoke-blackened mirror in a gilded frame. On the walls were huge photo-stills from the director’s other journeys into the margins: the strong faces of Guatamelan boys in a reformatory where he once led theater workshops, photos of Liberian child soldiers carrying AK-47s, stills from his documentary on the drug-war torn town of Medellin in Colombia. Throughout, icons and sculptures, masks and dripping chandeliers adorned altars, ceilings, walls. Candles in glass jars, emblazoned with Madonnas and saints, flickered in each room.
A devil mask faced Jean Stéphane’s own bed.
Jean Stéphane laughed. “Everything is positive!” he said.
The mansion of the bizarre hummed with energy.
“Every week you are full?” I asked.
“All the time.”
He, like his boxers and child soldiers, had created a new home, where all was safe and free.
The focus here---and in his films---is on the power of the body—whether trapped by bars, chains or social codes--to express itself in full confidence with no limits.