Travel to a distant land in your own backyard with the wild outlaw couple on the run film Silver Star, an English language film written and directed by the French team of Ruben Amar and Lola Bessis. Billie (Troy Leigh-Anne Johnson) is young, black, and performing in civil war reenactments. She is emulating a famous female relative of hers who dressed like a man to fight the South with the Buffalo soldiers. It is a tradition she inherited from her father, Mr. Sand (Tony Pellerin), who is too infirm to participate anymore. Billie is also on parole, as she served time for assaulting an officer who blinded her in one eye during an unwarranted traffic stop.
“Billie (Troy Leigh-Anne Johnson) is young, black, and performing in civil war reenactments.”
Mr. Sand does pool exercises at the senior center, with classes taught by Franny (Grace Van Dien), who is very pregnant and very peppy. Franny has a case worker herself for her drug use, as she was born addicted to crack. Franny gets fired for smoking weed with Mrs. Woodman (Getchie Argetsinger) at the center, and she has to be removed kicking and screaming. Meanwhile, Billie finds out from her brother, Tyrone (Johnath Davis), that because of the mortgage taken out to cover Billie’s legal bills, their parents’ house is going up for auction next week. In desperation, Billie stages a daring daylight robbery at a bank. Grazed by the bullet from a guard’s gun, she grabs a hostage, who turns out to be Franny. Things for these two will get as twisted as licorice, and as violent as a burning tornado.
Amar and Bessis, the French filmmakers behind Silver Star, offer something to the American audience that they can’t get easily anywhere else: a glimpse of America’s exoticism. As American culture was this country’s largest global export during the last century, U.S. citizens have become automatically numb to the swaths of Americana they see everywhere. I never noticed America’s uniqueness until I lived in Australia during high school. America is a much stranger and more mysterious place than it appears to those who live here. Amar and Bessis go out of their way to highlight the organic weirdness of the American way.
"…as sharp as a red-white-and-blue guillotine. "
