James Toback's provocative piece is what you could call a faux film noir. It scans the hip hop racial scene in New York, and the baleful fascination with gangsta rap, but disappointingly doesn't get deep-down to the homeboy roots of black culture. Instead, it culls its exotic blooms at white-power level.
It opens in the penthouse apartment of a rich black entrepreneur appropriately named Rich (and played by the equally appropriately mononym actor and musician Power). Here white boys - whom the ghetto gangs tag with disdainful sourness as "wiggas" - come to practise "talking black" and acting cool, while white girls (including Bijou Phillips) from affluent homes hang out to get it on with black men. A TV interviewer (Brooke Shields, dreadlocked and nose-ringed) is trying to articulate What It All Means. Her homosexual husband (Robert Downey Jnr) is more intent on propositioning than inquisitioning.
Toback has always been a flamboyantly transgressive film-maker, wrapped round his subjects - alcoholism, gambling - with no breathing space. He's better at issuing the prospectus than laying on the performance. Somewhere, his thesis that whitey's appropriation of black culture is a form of racial piracy gets lost in an implausible melodrama involving an undercover cop (Ben Stiller), a "sting" about throwing a college ball game, and a murder plot involving the son of a New York DA.
Toback is an airless director. He doesn't give his characters room to breathe naturally. His obsessions provide their oxygen and they always seem to be eyeballing each other confrontationally. When Downey starts seducing none other than Mike Tyson - one of several bold-face nominees from the gossip sheets, including model Claudia Schiffer, who do cameos - the film re-enters the cinévérité arena with gladiatorial flourishes. The convicted druggie versus the convicted rapist: these two antagonists deserve each other and their encounter produces a flare-up of genuine danger that the rest of the film only counterfeits. Overall, Black and White asks a question - are black kids being robbed of their identity? - then doesn't stop around long enough to answer it, let alone address itself to the ways in which the parlance, music and fashions of teenage American blacks are commodified and enter the codified universe of teenage American whites.
Black And White
Cert: cert15
