MIDNIGHT MADNESS

Charles-Henri Belleville is rapidly becoming one of the UK’s most promising young filmmakers, able to work wonders with next-to-nothing budgets. His first feature, the beautiful, melancholic THE INHERITANCE, was shot on a meagre £5,000 budget and nominated for Best British Film at the Raindance festival in 2007; not bad for a man who was just 23 at the time.

Proving his diversity as a filmmaker, his latest film, MIDNIGHT MADNESS, is about as far removed from THE INHERITANCE, with its Hamlet style themes of sibling rivalry and betrayal, as it’s possible to be. Instead, Belleville has turned his hand to documentary, chronicling one summer in the lives of three men whose lives revolve around Midnight Madness basketball.

Set up in 1999 by Nhamo Shire, Midnight Madness was originally intended to give young people in Harlsden a night-time alternative to the gang culture that claimed so many of their peers. In the early days, Shire paid for the gym hire himself and provided music from his stereo. Now, Midnight Madness has 25,000 members and a passionate following, and the best players get the chance to compete in the USA in the finals each summer.

Shot over 33 days in the summer of 2007, the narrative thread of the film is provided by three interconnecting stories: Shire, Mike Martin, a seasoned professional player determined to win the tournament in honour of his recently deceased mother, and Pierre-Henry Fontaine, a young rising star in UK basketball. The film charts the dramatic highs and lows of the season and the effect that the tournament has on them not just as players, but as people.

In both a technical and narrative sense, the film is a study in contrasts. Frenetic court shots, replete with rap soundtracks, are just as likely to be found as slow-motion goals overlaid with classical music. The sport is rendered both brutal and balletic by the camera. And this contrast is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the central characters themselves; Shire provides a wise fatherly presence, Martin is perhaps the most self-critical and introspective of the three and Fontaine, despite the promises that a US scholarship has failed to fulfil, remains for the most part upbeat and optimistic.

Though the budget was slightly larger than that of his first film, Belleville and his producer David Boaretto were still faced with the unenviable task of editing and reshooting 400 hours of footage with only £500 left of the original budget. To make matters worse, the footage had been shot in several different formats and in both NTSC and PAL.

However, you wouldn’t detect this dilemma from the results. Once again Belleville has created a film that is as accomplished technically as it is thematically, on next to no money. He does a great job of capturing the essence of his subjects, conveying effortlessly what the tournament represents for each one. This director is clearly no one-trick pony, and MIDNIGHT MADNESS should put him firmly on the map as a talent to watch. ■