To impersonate a personality completely different from who you really are and try to hide your identity, religion, color, and roots is practically impossible to verify, and despite that, some do not hesitate to do it as a crushing in front of the other or in search of what they think is a comfortable life.
Entire human groups may do so, thus misleading the path to the future, because the denial of identity leads to the transformation of individuals and groups into mere mutants bearing the features of a crushed and overwhelming culture, and often ends with a melodramatic end.
Africans in the white world (Europe or America) have known this equation for a long time through countless experiences, and yet some of them fall into the same pit called "self-hatred" and deny their clear identities.
British actor, writer and director Nathaniel Martello White presents the movie "The Strays", which is currently showing on the Netflix platform, during which he reviews one of the experiences of crushing in front of the other in his first experiences as a writer and director together.
Perhaps the personal experience of the English director of African descent is the first inspiration that gave him that brutal and warm energy at the same time through a melodramatic film that walks on the brink of violence on the one hand, and is close to scratching the sanctity of motherhood on the other hand, but his main game is that internal defeat that leads to concession. of oneself for the benefit of another.
The Strayers follows Cheryl (Ashley Madekwe), better known as "Nevy," who lives a privileged life in a quaint British suburb with her husband, Ian (Justin Salinger), and two teenage children, Sebastian and Mary (Samuel Small and Maria Almeida).
Neve is the vice-principal of a posh private school, but two unknown characters (Bucky Bakray and Jordan Merry) reveal her past.
Social horror
A film coming from Britain, which is the most famous and most present occupying force in the world for more than two centuries, and despite that, it carries among its scenes a promise to restore balance, which a director is committed to based on his own experience as a Briton of African descent who does not hide his desire to storm the walls of the neighborhoods of rich whites and reveal their contradictions .
The film contains 4 units of time that begin with the introductory scene, and despite the relatively large time difference between the beginning and end of the work, the film's narration is smooth and fluid thanks to the wonderful rhythm and the soundtrack, in which a hidden and enjoyable soundtrack emerged at the same time.
The film begins with an introductory scene prior to the presentation of the film's paintings in the so-called "Avan Tatar", during which the makers depicted the misery in which the mother "Cheryl" lives, her constant complaint of deprivation and her aspiration for money and a more spacious life, then her escape from her home, leaving her two young children without a caregiver.
And the director calculates that emotional separation, not just temporality, between the old, poor version of the character "Cheryl" and the transition to the same character with a new name, "Nevy", after she achieved dreams of wealth and belonging to a completely different class, and began to speak in the dialect of the upper class in society.
The director, Nathaniel Martello, was able to show the class signs clearly, starting from the first shot of the work, which depicted a building for public housing, and the camera was placed at the bottom, so that the building, despite the small size of its constituent units, appears to be a giant controlling and suffocating at the same time for those who live in it.
On the contrary, the director depicted - through the car window - the rich neighborhood to which "Cheryl" moved to become "Nevy", the extent of the wide streets and gardens of the houses and the spread of green on the sides of the roads and in the entrances of the houses.
Martello wanted to depict the suffocation experienced by the inhabitants of modest public buildings in exchange for the comfort in which the rich live. The idea arrived, but the most important question: Is what the work maker portrayed a justification for crushing in front of the rich and abandoning children and leaving them in the wind?
Just as Martello's interest in the suggestive and elegant visual language came his interest in the details that convey meaning in the performance of the actors in general and the heroine of the work, "Ashley Madikwe" in particular.
It seemed that "Ashley" was incredibly unified with her role in most scenes, although the emotions were lost in some aspects of the character, especially the scene of her discussion with her son and daughter from the first marriage from whom she fled, as she remained outside the case, but the director's touches seemed clear with her distinctive movement through The movie, as the wig always causes a kind of itching in her head, so she extends her hand under the wig, which hides her real African hair with a wig.
The mother fleeing from her two children did not stop denying her identity and her two children and fleeing away from them, but she took a violent stance towards the blacks in the school in which she works, to the extent that the white school principal tries to keep up with her in her attempts to expel the blacks from the school, but in a way that does not lead to accusing the administration of racial discrimination, and has One of her children confessed to his father, saying: My mother completely denies that she is not white.
The revenge of the strays
We are facing two lives, the first of which ended with the escape of the mother, leaving her two children, and the other began with her marriage to a white man and the birth of two other children.
The four children grew up, but in two completely contradictory environments, so the two abandoned children formed incredible areas of cruelty as a natural reflection of their suffering during 20 years after they were offered for adoption, abandoned, and exposed to all kinds of assaults.
The two abandoned children appear in their mother's life, as the older one goes to get a job at the school - which his mother works in - as a cleaner, while his sister seizes the opportunity to establish a friendship with her mother's sister, to learn what the lucky sister enjoys.
The director has played games of suspense and excitement since the appearance of the two children, as they seemed to be visual hallucinations experienced by the mother, "Nevi", as she sees her eldest son in different places, and every time she approaches collapse, and when she glimpses her abandoned son with his sister at school, she is determined to expel him as a cleaner. It is not disciplined.
On the birthday of his sister, who suffered with him the path of life without a mother, the abandoned eldest son decides to storm his mother’s house and obtain his full rights and take revenge for the years of deprivation he lived with his sister. Indeed, the teenager and his sister storm the house of their mother, her white husband, and her two children, but he cannot take revenge because the mother who abandoned two children does It is difficult for her to abandon 4 children.
interpretation
The work makers condemn the mechanism of continuous discrimination by the mother / earth between her children, and condemns her personally, especially when she sneaks away from the house of the white husband, while a process of revenge is taking place that her children lead against each other.
The entertaining cinematic text made by Nathaniel Martello White presents a vision related to the symbolism of women as the womb of humanity or the land that gave birth to two races, black and white, and chose to grant the white race privileges that enabled it to control wealth, power and influence.
Martello heralds an upcoming revenge violence through which Africans will try to take revenge and obtain the rights that have been plundered throughout history.