Five Fingers for Marseilles
Tau (Vuyo Dabula), the conflicted protagonist of Michael Matthews’ Five Fingers for Marseille, walks the walk and talks the talk of the reformed gunslinger common in Western movies—of Will Munny, Jimmy Ringo, the Waco Kid, Charley Postlewaite and others. From the film’s start to its senselessly bloody finish, Tau battles his past—his sense of duty to his homeland and his people at odds with his criminal record. He wants to do good. He’s stymied by his history of doing bad.
That’s the fate of the fighter traveling a redemptive road. What separates Tau from his predecessors in the Western canon is the film’s setting, removed from the plains and plateaus of America’s Old West to the hinterlands of South Africa. In Five Fingers for Marseille, we see a Western tale that’s familiar and new at the same time, a story of penance and pistols where the living and the dead are sorted out based on their aim and their quickdraw, but set against the backdrop of the settled instead of the settlers. Most Western movies focus on those seeking prosperity or peace in the unforgiving cradle of the new American frontier. Five Fingers for Marseille focuses on characters living with the consequences of colonization perpetrated by Europeans of every stripe: the Italians, the Spanish and, of course, the French.
We meet Tau as a boy, one member of the Five Fingers, a gang dedicated to hectoring colonial authorities in the town of Marseilles at the business end of their slingshots, until skirmishes with police escalate and Tau accidentally kills two officers. He flees, and the film flashes forward to his adulthood, spent as an outlaw serving twenty years in prison. Newly released, Tau returns home determined to stay straight. But home, dubbed New Marseilles, is not the same as when Tau left it. It’s still run by corrupt authorities, but they’re homegrown rather than imported: Luyanda (Mduduzi Mabaso), former Finger and current chief of police, and Sepoko (Hamilton Dhlamini), “Ghost,” a gravel-voiced, thoroughly compelling gangster figure born of what reads as culturally specific myth-making. (He’s a heavy for the ages.)
Luyanda and Sepoko are two spokes on the axis of New Marseilles’ power dynamics, effectively sponsored by another of Tau’s old chums, Bongani (Kenneth Nkosi), mayor of New Marseilles, who governs through complicity in criminal activity: He wheels and deals with both villains and naively hopes to serve his constituents through a “less harm than good” governance philosophy. Tau just wants peace, and seeks to avoid all three of them. But Westerns are about formula, so we know collision between the good, the bad and the ugly is inevitable.