You can accuse Spike Lee of many things, but one of them certainly isn’t laziness. “Chi-Raq,” his latest film, rolling into movie theaters in the US on December 4, is the director at his most urgent, madcap, and ambitious. A present-day reimagining of Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” which involves an attempt by the women of Greece to put an end to the Peloponnesian War by refusing to have sex with their husbands, “Chi-Raq” focuses on a sex-strike among the women in Chicago who want to put a stop to gang violence. After a young child is gunned down in the streets, caught up in the crossfire between the rival gangs the Spartans (led by the rapper Chi-Raq, played by Nick Cannon) and the Trojans (Wesley Snipes, sporting an eye-patch and a high-pitched giggle), Chi-Raq’s girlfriend, Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris), is forced into action. Making her way through the streets, she rounds up women associated with both gangs, along with an older generation of women from the neighborhood, bringing them together under the common slogan: “No pussy, no peace.”Leading the audience through the maze is Dolmedes, played by Samuel L. Jackson. A narrator in a bright suit and a fedora, and sporting a cane, he introduces the unique rhythm of the film: the majority of the dialogue is recited in rhyme, a combination of musical sing-speak and Elizabethan verse. The tone of the film shares the same kind of movement back and forth, sometimes drastically, from earnest to bawdy, and often incorporating direct-address. It takes getting used to but its relentlessness is overpowering and intoxicating. This is a Spike Lee joint with everything you can imagine and more rolled up in it, to the point where it’s about to burst at the seams.The film also arrives with an abundance of off-screen controversy. Most of it came before anybody had actually seen it, as these things usually go, but the general complaint from local politicians, including Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, was that the title of the film, a portmanteau of Chicago and Iraq, was a “slap in the face” to the city’s residents. On more solid footing, a variety of critics, after seeing the trailer, were also skeptical of the politics of “Chi-Raq,” especially its focus on black-on-black crime instead of police brutality, considering the never-ending moment we’re living through, and its placement of women as the bearers of responsibility and, as the critic Soraya Nadia McDonald wrote in an interview with Lee in the Washington Post, “the keepers of sexuality.”Even though some of this criticism is right on the mark, the film engages with a lot of ideas — much more so than the trailer and the simple plot sketch convey. This is most notable in a scene in the middle of the film: John Cusack, playing the local preacher, delivers a long, fiery sermon, breaking down the connections between economic inequality, police brutality, and street violence. It’s a startling scene, partly because of the camera’s constrained focus on the character, for multiple minutes, as he speaks to a rapt and emotional audience, and partly because Lee appears to be anticipating the criticism “Chi-Raq” is bound to receive. You think the film is preachy? Well, he seems to be saying, here’s a literal preacher.“Chi-Raq” is Lee at his most unfettered. He’s always had a taste for the operatic, and his politics have often been questionable when put under a microscope. But his best work — and “Chi-Raq” is one of his best films, maybe the best since the severely underappreciated and equally satirical “Bamboozled” (2000) — is produced with a sense of urgency. Satire is a funny thing in that it’s often confused with comedy. But this is not funny, despite Lee’s attempts to make the audience laugh. And he knows this, which is not so subtly hinted at in the siren-calls that bookend the film: “THIS IS AN EMERGENCY,” a title says at the opening, flashing across the screen, before directing us at the end to “WAKE UP.”
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