Spike Lee’s latest film, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, begins its theatrical run at the Film Society of Lincoln Center today.
Following his remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, Spike Lee tackles another bloody cultural artifact: the late Bill Gunn’s 1973 cult thriller Ganja & Hess (which screened here recently as part of Tell It Like It Is, our showcase of black independent filmmaking in New York). This time, Stephen Tyrone Williams is Dr. Hess Greene, an affluent professor of African art who, in a scuffle with his assistant (Elvis Nolasco, a Lee collaborator since 1995’s Clockers), is stabbed with a cursed Ashanti dagger. Now sporting a taste for blood, he meets his assistant’s wife (Zaraah Abrahams), and the two embark on what Lee dubs “a new kind of love story.”
Da Sweet Blood of Jesus blends the social awareness of all the director’s works (commenting obliquely on addiction and class inequity) with the invigorating roughness of a crowdfunded project shot in an astonishing 16 days. Musical highlights include Bruce Hornsby’s jazz piano score and a rousing gospel performance at the Lil’ Piece of Heaven Baptist Church of Lee’s Red Hook Summer.
Critics praised the intimacy with which Lee approached the subject matter, and the “unparalleled beauty he finds” in the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.
“Da Sweet Blood of Jesus,” Spike Lee’s new film, is a grisly and ghoulish vampire story. It is also an evident labor of love…Mr. Lee has earned a reputation as a polemicist and provocateur, but he has also been, from the beginning, a sensualist and a visual stylist,” noted The New York Times this week in their review of the film.
Yet for all its frenetic gore and sensuality Da Sweet Blood of Jesus remains a contemplative work, one in which Lee reflects upon his own rise to success and weaves it into a complex tale about the assimilation of African Americans into the upper echelons of society. Slant wrote about what an alienating transition it can be: “This film is a parable of the parasitic divide between the haves and the have-nots, between men and women, between blacks and whites. It's also about the loneliness and the social estrangement that characterizes life on any portion of this wide variety of social spectrums, uniting us, though it's just as knowingly occupied with the cathartic pleasure of the rarefied life that's enabled by mass suffering.”
The New Yorker observed this sense of being cut-adrift in their review as well: “The movie is distortedly expressive, almost hermetic in its subjective intensity, as flagrantly symbolic as Gunn’s, with an extra strain of self-doubt and even despair.”
Above all, Lee never lost sight of the daring cult classic that engendered his film. Speaking to blackfilm.com, he described his relationship to the original work and its visionary director: “We have the film as part of the legacy of Bill Gunn — a great, great filmmaker, playwright and director. This film is a child of Ganja & Hess.”
Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is a genre-smashing story of grotesque wealth and paralyzing desire embodied by the romance between two vampires.
[Get ticket and showtime information for Da Sweet Blood of Jesus here.]
