Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is a good, abrasive crime film, worth the effort if a tidy chase is not the chief attraction. Melvin Van Peebles directs, writes and plays Sweetback, and the film’s political anger gives it a force the plotting cannot always sustain. The pursuit grows repetitive. What keeps us watching is the visual invention, which can make a familiar action-film device feel awkward and unpredictable again.

Robert Maxwell’s cinematography provides the material for the psychedelic montage, with Melvin Van Peebles also taking the editing credit. That combination produces the film’s most absorbing passages, where the treatment of the images becomes more interesting than the business of keeping a chase going. We felt jolted by the montage; its disruptions made us pay attention again when the pursuit had begun to lose us. There is considerable pleasure in watching the images change, even when following the story is less rewarding.

The film works as a fable addressed to people accustomed to being pushed aside, and its bluntness makes sense on those terms. There is little interest in making the anger comfortable. We welcome that, particularly in a genre that can turn conflict into an easy evening’s diversion. But the deliberate overstatement sometimes becomes wearing, and the film is less persuasive when it presses the same point without finding a fresh way to express it.

Melvin Van Peebles’s music helps maintain the sense of agitation, and we count that pressure among the film’s strengths. Sound and cutting keep the action unsettled even when the screenplay has become predictable. Yet sustained intensity needs some variation if it is to keep working. There are passages where the music and editing have already done enough, and the continued insistence makes their effect less powerful.

The screenplay is the weaker part of Melvin Van Peebles’s many contributions. Several of the vignettes are absorbing, but the repeated chase scenes ask movement to supply interest that the writing has not earned. We grew impatient with that repetition, because another stretch of pursuit was too often giving us the same experience. A running time of 98 minutes should suit such direct filmmaking, but the chase occupies more of it than the story can usefully support.

Still, the unevenness should not obscure how much of the filmmaking works. The independently made film risks being abrasive, and its best visual passages justify that risk without requiring us to make allowances for them. The action genre benefits from this willingness to interrupt a chase and make us look differently, even when the resulting film is harder to enjoy. We wish the writing offered as much variety as the montage, but there is plenty here to hold our attention.

We recommend it most readily to viewers interested in confrontational political cinema, who may find its overstatement easier to accept. The visual invention gives us enough pleasure to forgive the slack passages, though patience is required. Anyone chiefly after a tightly plotted thriller should choose something else.