The Niles Files: Words as Weapons | l’etoile

Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man is filled with aerial views of sleeping cities and long shots of desolate streets with the winter steam rising. What people we see on those streets are obscured by space, anonymous, and dwarfed by the metal and brick overhead and grizzled concrete below. On top of the images, bordering on abstraction as the camera tracks laterally, is a forceful and pained guitar strumming and voice. “Sugar man,” he sings, “won’t you hurry, ’cause I’m tired of these scenes…won’t you bring back all those colors to my dreams?” The lyric is addressed to a drug dealer, whose bag of narcotics carries the means to escape from a dreary existence of impoverishment and busted hope. “You’re the answer,” he sings to the sugar man, “that makes my questions disappear.” The song is the soundtrack to reality.

via The Niles Files: Words as Weapons | l’etoile.