Review: ‘The Order of Myths’ LAFF 08

15 years before New Orleans started the Mardi Gras celebrations that it would eventually become famous for, another city had begun its own form of southern festival traditions. Based around a series of mystic societies with secret memberships, the events that take place in Mobile, Alabama each year at Mardi Gras are held with the highest form of respect in the town. Every year a festival king and queen of Mardi Gras are crowned for the city and then it happens again, one set of crowns for the white community’s approval, and one set of crowns for the black community. Even 300 years from their start, some traditions, be they parade floats or segregation, refuse to fade away.

Margaret Brown’s sophomore documentary feature “The Order of Myths” (named for one of Mobile’s most prominent secret pageant societies) is a straight-forward look not just at the events surrounding one year’s festivities in the city, but about life in the city as a whole. We see the city’s conflicted heart of people both working towards and trying to pull away from the status-quo of life there. Mobile has a black mayor, yet in the background of every event at the all white MCA event committees Brown makes sure to linger on the black butlers serving drinks and preparing food. The only black performers in the white parades are the traditional roles of dancers and musicians. Yet, when the focus switches to the black court of the MAMGA, it becomes clear that the black community is in no particular hurry to lose their own set of standards and handed down traditions by combining with the white pageants. It’s a delicate balance between old damages and new horizons in the city, and Brown’s film offers a cross section of both sides of the racial division evenly.

Shot in a mostly cinema-verite style, Brown only reveals a personal connection in the matter at the film’s end, with her family’s own link to the pageant’s history and her own grandmother a former pageant queen. While balancing some delicate subject matter with the appropriate humor (a running joke about the town’s obsession with Moon Pies is particularly funny), Brown relies on personal accounts from residents which turn out to be forward thinking at times, and hopelessly clueless and self-incriminating at others, at least compared to today’s explosively PC standards. There still seems to be hope for a meeting of cultures resting in a new generation of young people, for them to come together from both sides and “break bread”. The film does seem manipulative at times in its imagery and implications; it follows up one resident’s description of the town’s pride in its trees with a segment on the town’s history of lynching, and it is almost impossible at times to see the masked members of the white MCA courts and not immediately be reminded of the KKK. However, Brown has stated that she had no agenda going into the filming of festival life, and discovered the racial through-line during the filming of her 370 hours of footage. The result is a mostly effective look at the state of the affairs in Alabama, and its success lies with the honesty of its subjects and a respect for where they’ve been, good or bad.

[rating: 3.5/5]