The Film That Made ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song’ Possible

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/movies/van-peebles-three-day-pass.html

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I don’t think anyone who sees the title “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” forgets it. The eye-popping film made Melvin Van Peebles a pioneer of 1970s American cinema and pure independent hustle. But a few years earlier, Van Peebles directed his first trailblazer in France: “The Story of a Three Day Pass,” his feature debut, which was released commercially in 1968 and is opening at Film Forum on Friday in a new restoration.

It’s the deceptively simple story of Turner (Harry Baird), a Black American G.I. on weekend leave in Paris. But Van Peebles threads Turner’s hopes and joys with seemingly inescapable aggressions against him as a Black man and societal anxieties surrounding race. The story’s romantic idyll is shot through with a prickly visual style and a biting candor — all in a film that pointedly couldn’t happen in the United States.

By the 1960s, Van Peebles, a Chicago native and Air Force veteran, had made some short films and published a memoir about working on a San Francisco cable car. But in Hollywood, doors were still closed to Black filmmakers, despite changes in the air and cultural upheaval across the nation. So like many Black artists before him, Van Peebles headed to Europe. He studied for a doctorate in astronomy in Amsterdam, wrote more, and found a fan in Henri Langlois, head priest of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris.

“The Story of a Three Day Pass” was based on one of the novels Van Peebles wrote in French, winning him a grant and a spot in the country’s directors’ guild. In 1967, he premiered the feature at the San Francisco International Film Festival — as part of the French delegation — next to art-house giants like Satyajit Ray and Agnès Varda. The movie’s title in French was “La Permission,” but Van Peebles took permission for himself.

Turner’s weekend leave should be the most ordinary thing in the world — a soldier’s escape. But it can’t be carefree for Turner, whose white commanding officer makes a big deal of trusting him with a promotion and a three-day pass. In a mirror, the goofily hopeful Turner sees his sarcastic reflection talking to him: the promotion, his mirror self says, is just a reward for being an obedient “Uncle Tom.” Van Peebles pits the two Turners against each other in a bewildering split screen.

That kind of double consciousness, and the feelings it churns up, loom over Turner’s journey. The soldier does have one perfect moment, early in his Paris trip. He steps into a bar, shades on and ready to unwind. Except he doesn’t walk — he glides. The camera keeps him at center, poised and cool, as he moves through the drinkers and dancers. You might recognize the same dolly shot from Spike Lee’s movies, transporting you into the dream of a moment. But here it is in 1967 — the unmistakable flourish of a Van Peebles joint.

At the bar, Turner picks up a demure Frenchwoman, Miriam (Nicole Berger, who co-starred in the French new wave classic “Shoot the Piano Player”). There’s a sweet, awkward innocence to their flirting across language differences and dancing to the turtlenecked house band. They plan a trip to the countryside the next day. But Van Peebles shows how their experiences couldn’t be more wildly different.

The two get settled in a Normandy inn, and their inner monologues are revealed in fantasy sequences during sex. You might say Van Peebles doesn’t mince images: Turner visualizes himself as a squire returning to his estate and his maid Miriam, while Miriam sees herself running through a jungle, seized by African tribesmen, one played by Turner. When it comes to technique, Van Peebles is fearless, using hard cuts in edits and Godardian music cues, as well as collaborating on the score.

Turner and Miriam do have a lovely time in the village, until a musician in a bar refers to them as “Miss Big Eyes” and “Señor Blackie.” Then on the beach, they run into soldiers from his base. Word gets back about his fraternizing, and his promotion is revoked. (Van Peebles keeps us on our toes with a deus ex machina: a visiting church group from Harlem.)

For Van Peebles, the studio movie did finally come next: “Watermelon Man,” starring Godfrey Cambridge as a bigoted white suburbanite who one day wakes up to find he’s Black. “Sweetback” followed (“rated X by an all-white jury,” said ads); then playwriting, leading to several Tony nominations; and a stint as a trader on Wall Street. You can see Van Peebles’s influence in Lee and really any filmmaker who truly goes for broke (like the anticolonialist French-Mauritanian director Med Hondo, who is said to have hosted Van Peebles in Paris).

“I never decided to become a director,” Van Peebles, now 88, said in a Directors Guild of America interview conducted by his son, the filmmaker Mario Van Peebles. “I just decided to show folks, especially minorities, like I saw them, not like they kept being shown around in cinema.” With “The Story of a Three Day Pass,” Melvin Van Peebles shattered the usual mirrors presented in movies, with a crash that reverberated far beyond one soldier’s weekend off.