Raven Jackson used to be a poet and is still a photographer. You can see traces of both in her feature debut, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (a line from a poem), a deeply meditative celebration of rural black life on the Mississippi.
The film starts with long, slow, close-ups of a girl and her daddy fishing by a river, the father calmly and quietly instructing his daughter when to pay out a bit more line and when to slowly start winding it in with a fish on the end.
From here a series of languid scenes tracking the girl, Mackenzie, through life at home with her sister and parents, forwards in time to her a bit older, then older still, lying heavily pregnant in a bath expecting her own child. Forwards and backwards, with different actresses playing Mack and her sister Josie – learning from their mother, then from each other (how to kiss), and then on their own (falling in love) – with water and thunder regularly recurring in this emotionally driven story. It’s almost as if someone took the already relaxed Beasts of the Southern Wild and slowed it down a bit more, Jackson getting about three quarters of the way to Slow Cinema, but with just enough narrative to make her film its own animal.
How sharp and warm the images, how romanticised the lifestyle – catching fish, no other visible means of support – a sensory moodboard more than an out-and-out drama.
It’s very female-centric, less informed by what’s said than what’s experienced – animal noises, rooks cawing, crickets chirping, sighs and sniffles, Jackson keeping the camera up close and using unconventional framing to make her images more arresting.
The long takes and hypnotic way it’s edited together – we slide from one age of Mack to another with barely a break, though it’s another actor in the role – conjure up a world that is entire unto itself. Black lives don’t just matter in this movie, the way of life of rural black people is celebrated as important and beautiful.
If you’re not down with this, it just won’t work, and Jackson’s film won’t be to all tastes. There’s not much in the way of plot, and in some respects it resembles David Gordon Green’s debut, George Washington, but amplified, stripped back and brought closer for inspection. If you didn’t like that, I’m guessing you won’t like this.
And yet there’s so much to see. What carefully dovetailing performances by Kaylee Nicole Johnson and Charleen McClure, the actors playing Mack at different points of her life. How glowingly Jackson wraps them in a set design by Juliana Barreto Barreto that’s full of the nostalgia-laden ephemera of the past – old tins, patterned wallpaper – and how well Jackson emphasises black skin, often in conjunction with water.
At one point Jackson shows us the congregation at a church, one after the other in a slow montage – faces in repose, filling the screen. The effect is calming and beautiful, beatific even.
Too many films like this would be too much. This is caviar not mashed potato. As a corrective to other films about black life, where there’s so often an “issue”, it’s weighty, and the name Barry Jenkins attached as a producer (he did Moonlight) comes as no surprise.
Where will Jackson go next? As I write she doesn’t even have her own page on Wikipedia and her website is very bare bones and not at all full of the usual self-aggrandising mission statements that usually decorate these things. By her work shall ye know her, I suppose.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024