Having earned brownie points with his well-regarded debut Hustle And Flow, director Craig Brewster has gone for broke with this intriguingly Christian exploitation flick. Utilising some the most salacious, grindhouse imagery to ever sneak into a mainstream production, Black Snake Moan, at first glance, seems suspiciously like Pygmalion reworked as a vehicle for Christine Lundbergh or some other paracinema starlet of the tawdry ‘70s.
Christina Ricci, always game for an oddity or a new tattoo, ate nothing but fries and candy in preparation for her role as Rae, a surly white-trash skank with bad skin and a history of childhood sexual abuse and several venereal diseases. She’s trying to be decent for the sake of her equally damaged sweetheart (Timberlake in another excellent performance) but the devil seems to control everything from the waist down. When he ships out on National Guard duty, he’s barely got out of the dirty south when the fever takes hold and the girl’s gotta have it.
Enter bluesman Lazarus (Jackson), a god-fearing, cuckolded small farmer whose wife has recently left him for his brother. When he finds a battered Rae by the side of the road, he aims to save. Using the same patriarchal logic that fires his belief system he chains her to a radiator for something like a hoodoo exorcism. They bond in due course. Her profane presence inspires him to play the blues again, while his sacred thinking puts her in nice dresses instead of a confederacy flag mini-t and filthy knickers.
This decidedly weird mash-up exists somewhere between the timeless depression era shanties of Zora Neale Hurston’s folk-tales, the King James Bible and a Jerry Springer confessional. Tellingly, Brewster punctuates the film with archive footage of Son House pontificating on the human condition. That’s how you come to realise where you are; you’re trapped in the Blues-iverse, baby. That’s why, like The Great Gatsby or Baby Doll, the heat is a character. That’s why the non-sequiturs, such as the party that springs from nowhere for a Lazarus guitar session, doesn’t seem as off-key as they might. And that’s why women’s lib has no real sway here.
It doesn’t always work and the trashy, distempered sexuality might well (and aught to) offend, but Black Snake Moan lives up (or should that be down?) to the 1927 Blind Lemon Jefferson song it borrows its title from. Days later, you will wash but you won’t feel entirely clean. Works for me. Somewhere out there, Ron Ormond is smiling.