[critical] White Lightnin’

At the heart of the Appalachian mountains, in West Virginia, where every man owns a gun and what to distill alcohol smuggling, lives a legend : Jesco White.

Of his youth drenched in the smell of gasoline passing through many stays in juvenile reformatory or in a psychiatric hospital, and the tumultuous and incandescent Jesco was consumed dangerously.

To save him, his father tries to teach him at least one thing in life : to dance, or rather a version frenzy of tap-dancing on country music.

Propelled on the front of the stage, clapped to the four corners of the country, Jesco taste to life and falls in love.

But, obsessed with revenge for the murder of his father, he wakes up the demons that are in him !

Author’s Note

[rating:9/10]

• Release Date : February 17, 2010

• Directed by Dominic Murphy

• Film british

• With Edward Hogg, Kirk Bovill, Carrie Fisher

• Duration : 1h 24min

• Trailer :

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Often it is when we least expect it as a surprise of the most pleasant, inviting, and we left more up to the arrival of the end credits. This is the case with White Lightnin’. Small independent film that was made about him a little bit everywhere on the globe but that as usual has been very poorly served in France. Why ? Simply because the film is very particular, and that its director, is not called David Lynch but Dominic Murphy and this is his first film.

Psychedelic trip rummaging around in the bowels of Man and out of this as there are more bad, White Lightnin’ is a work of rare intensity visual as well as emotional. We follow with special interest the long descent to the underworld of Jesco White, a man lost from his childhood and struggling with internal forces malicious pushing it to self-destruct. Everything goes, from the mutilation to the sniffing of the scent of gasoline or paint through the injection of doses of heroin, nothing escapes Jesco White. Only his father, believing still that his chances of happiness, fought body and soul for him to learn one thing : to tap dance. For a time, these latest the go away of its wanderings evil and he will graze the finger with a happiness that he never actually saw her. Only here, on the day his father died, murdered, it is against his sandstone that Jesco White is returning to his old inner demons that have never left.

With a staging that deliberately choppy and bare-bones, White Lightnin’ portrays brilliantly the daily torture of Jesco White. On this point, it is appropriate to greet or rather, cheering on the talent of the two actors interprétants this character : Owen Campbell (young Jesco), which has the star in the making and Edward Hogg, impressive credibility. Very dark and violent, sordid, the story seems straight out of a novel by Tom Wolfe (Acid Test) or Hunter S. Thompson (the choice Hell’s Angels or Las Vegas Parano). The brightness and the film varying over the scenes translate perfectly to the emotional stages that the character crosses. If one adds to this the country music veering slowly to the rite, shamanic, White Lightnin’ is a masterpiece too modest to be noticed.

This is the problem with a film like this which is not remember a certain Valhalla Rising : if we do not come to him, and that you don’t take the time to discover a step-by-step, this is certainly not him who mâchera the work in our place. A film that will divide surely will but that can leave the viewer indifférant. The mark of great movies ? Certainly.