NOLA CIRCUS – Review

Review by Mark Longden

A French director, whose stated aim was to make a movie like the beloved Italian comedies of his youth, goes to the USA and makes a combination of every early Spike Lee movie. It’s an interesting stew of influences, but is it any good?

Almost all of NOLA CIRCUS is set on a street corner in New Orleans, a quiet backwater far from Bourbon Street. Will (Martin Bradford, The Free State Of Jones) owns a barber’s shop that also contains a cupcake shop; he sort of feuds with the barber’s shop across the road, run by Marvin the Scissors (British comedian Vas Blackwood). Marvin has his underlings, Happy the Big Ears and Con the Anaconda, and a girlfriend, Karen (Kamille McCuin), who sells “pills” to the local ne’er-do-wells. Will is in a relationship with the beautiful Nola (Jessica Morali), but Nola’s brother Denzel (Reginal Vance) is insanely protective of her, meaning they have to keep their relationship quiet. Nola and Karen appear to have got separate slices of the same genetic pie – she looks white, with very dark hair, and he’s black, just with a completely white Afro and beard.

The plot comes from two strands, although it’s got a bit of that barber-shop-ensemble feeling to it. Will, desperate to get Denzel off his back, lies to him that Nola has been in a relationship with a pizza delivery boy. This causes Devin to viciously – way past the point it should be in a comedy – beat any pizza delivery guy he sees, so the extremely racist Italian-American shop owner hires a Mafia hitman to come and sort his problem out for him. They’re struggling to find where or who Denzel is, despite several of the pizza guys visiting Will’s store. A big guy with a huge white afro would have to stand out a little, right?

The other side is the feud between the barbers, and the first scene of the movie, a flash-forward where Will’s shop is broken into by the KKK. A central gag is those KKK guys using helium to disguise their voices (although if you can’t figure out who it is after about 5 minutes, congratulations on seeing your first ever movie); only they continue to do this when they’re on their own in the middle of the forest, nowhere near anywhere. This laziness is a metaphor for the whole sorry mess, unfortunately.

Plot lines get picked up and dropped seemingly at random. Nola and Karen, after smoking weed all day, decide to kidnap a rich old white woman dressed as Playboy bunnies; the resolution to this is pathetic, like they got three-quarters of the way through filming and realized they’d forgotten about it. Will is the central character  (and the most interesting) yet he’s ignored for most of the movie as we get long, racist-term-filled screaming matches, or see Denzel march down the street looking for his sister for the twentieth time, or see two guys with slightly different stammers attempt have a long conversation. And the two stores seem to have no reason to feud, other than that’s what happens in this sort of movie?

It’s a genuine puzzler to figure out when this movie is set, too. Will is an admirer of Rosa Parks, and is regularly to be found on a street corner distributing leaflets to a Parks-themed sermon he’s about to give. I guess I found it quite surprising that a young black man in 2017 would be so passionate about (the undoubtedly wonderful and inspiring) Parks; aside from a few long shots of new cars, the movie could have been set in the 1960s and would have looked exactly the same. Well, that is until someone mentions getting fashion advice from a blog somewhere near the end. No phones, no TVs, nothing new at all.

I wonder if there’s an audience for this that I’m just not a part of. There are filmmakers who seem to have found a profitable niche selling their movies to a section of the black community – broad comedies, with a strong religious bent, really bizarre white stereotypes, families being emphasized, and everything being alright at the end. This isn’t to denigrate those sorts of movies or the people that like them (hell, I like 1980s Philippines-based kung fu movies, I have no basis to look down on anyone). But my complete lack of experience precludes me from making a statement about whether NOLA CIRCUS  is part of that trend or not, and would therefore appeal to that audience. All I can tell you is it really didn’t appeal to this audience (me).

I can’t tell if the ending is staggeringly sexist or they just ran out of money and time and went with the only idea anyone had; either way, it’s absolutely horrible. Overall, too, it’s sloppy and lazy (one example: how terrible is Marvin’s hair? Who’d go into a barber’s where the owner looked like he’d not cut or combed his own hair in years?) and feels like…well, an American movie made by a French guy who doesn’t really understand America all that well.

Almost all the great comedies are played straight, with the comedy coming from the script. People, by and large, don’t need to be told that something is funny, but Annest appears to have not got that memo, as every single person in NOLA CIRCUS  overacts like their lives depended on it. It stops short of sound effects when someone is getting hit in the head, but that’s about the only hoary old routine they don’t pull out of their bag of tricks.

I think I smiled a few times, but that’s it. Let’s hope Luc Annest has a few more runs at his own script for his next movie.

NOLA CIRCUS is in theaters April 21, 2017 and on VOD and iTunes April 25, 2017.