Haiti is on my mind today because of the havoc Hurricane Hannah wreaked there recently, so today's film music moment of the day comes from a great little documentary that you might have missed in 2006: Ghosts of Cité Soleil, about the densely populated shanty-town in Port au Prince, one of the most violent and dangerous places on earth.
As film-music moments go, it's rare that a montage can capture the coveted (*cough*) film-music moment of the day on this blog because it's just too easy and hackneyed a trope, but the opening sequence of Ghosts is powerful as all get-out. The muffled groove and downcast sax loops set the scene perfectly—smiling kids in nothing but underwear running through unpaved roads, a woman in a sarong shaking her ass to the rhythm...the music lulls you into a false sense of simple sub-tropical pleasures until pop! The beat breaks free and Wyclef's thick voice engraves the haze with hardcore realities of life in Cité Soleil. At this point director Asgar Leth shows you an aerial shot of this place, and suddenly you're seeing the sheer mass of this slum, a gaping hellmouth of corrugated tin.
It's all done perfectly in this one montage, a brilliantly rhythmic introduction to a harrowing story about two brothers in charge of two different gangs in this vibrant, lethal place (which is, I might add, a mere two hour flight from Miami). The montage is set to a Wyclef Jean tune called "Good Girls," though this is difficult to verify as the soundtrack has never been released.
Adding to the gritty realism is the music of one of the documentary's main subjects, Winson Jean Bart (aka "Haitian 2Pac"), a gangster and aspiring rapper whose thugster services were solicited directly by the now ousted Haitian president, Jean Baptiste Aristide. He's a warm, deeply charismatic and yet also somewhat terrifying figure, and he provides another of Ghost's most powerful film-music moments when he delivers his politically-charged lyrics over the phone to the Haitian-born Wyclef Jean.
"Rap music influenced them people deep over there, says Wyclef Jean after listening to the performance on speaker phone. "They will live by it and they will die by it and that ain't no Hollywood movie. That's just the truth and that's the way they get down over there."
Ghosts got some criticism for presenting little in the way of possible solutions to the problems of poverty and violence in Haiti, but I this film is more about the story of Winson Jean Bart and his brother as it moves inexorably toward a tragic end. With subject matter this rich, it''s a valid approach simply to tell the story in all its unvarnished truth and without an agenda beyond the telling. After all, you can say that Haiti is still paying the political price for being the first post-colonial, independent, black-led nation in the world, but without the personal stories like that of Bart, these pronouncements don't carry much weight for those who don't live there.
Now, I will forevermore be haunted by the question posed by Bart in the beginning of the film as he sits, solemnly smoking a cigarette sits in a corrugated tin shack, his exquisite cheekbones bathed in the light of one lightbulb: "How my life gonna be? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe good, maybe bad. I don't know. Lord knows."
