When arriving in the tourist town of Natchez, Mississippi, there would appear to be a couple ways you could go with a guide in the proudly Southern burgh where much of the Antebellum architecture remains in pristine condition. A place that was rescued by a steady flow of visitors after their primary export of cotton was bedeviled by boll weevils and community leaders saw fit to open the doors to opulent mansions that sat on former plantations to offer a window into the past, there is the option to simply step foot inside palatial estates such as Choctaw Hall where David Garner, an elderly gent who fits the profile of anyone’s first thought of a Southern dandy, can regale guests with fond remembrances of what once was and family heirlooms, but it’d be hard to resist the pull of Rev Collins, a Black pastor who’s spends every other day of the week but Sunday using his rhetorical skills to bring history to life driving people around Natchez, doing as the side of his van promises to show them “the REAL Mississippi.”
As someone can be overheard saying early in ”Natchez,” Suzannah Herbert’s deliriously enjoyable and enlightening doc, many of the lavish homes that people come to the town to see have slave quarters just around the back and it’s fascinating how various members of the community decide on how to tell their history, not only in how it reflects the truth as they know it but ultimately having a lot of sway over how it will be remembered in the future. Herbert touches down in town at a pivotal point when some of the historic houses may not be open for much longer, due in part to fading interest when both visitors and the homes’ proprietors are becoming too old to sustain the costs of keeping up the property. Still, it’s an enchanting place where a pipe organist circles the streets in the flatbed of a truck and a social calendar akin to the one kept up by locals before the Civil War remains intact with afternoon tea and balls, though in a nod to modern times they welcome in drag queens (attracting protests outside).
“Natchez” opens with a shot of a riverboat amidst shimmering sea that appears as if it’s an impressionist portrait ready to be hung behind glass in a museum, one of the countless examples of “Jawline” director of photography Noah Collier’s resplendent cinematography throughout where spherical lenses burnish the corners of the frame as if to lock the film in time and can capture a floor to ceiling view of mansions where the chandeliers and fine china on the table below are shown to be as overwhelming as they no doubt are in person. However, being conscious of the lens brings as much substance as style to the proceedings when the film so thoroughly takes one into the different points of view around Natchez’s tortured past where the idea of gentility and refinement has prevented a true exchange of ideas about slavery from ever directly taking place, with some preferring a more rose-tinted view than others.
While there’s no inference that the descendants of slave owners should be held in contempt for the decisions of generations long since passed, the financial incentive to propagate a mythic version of the Deep South and the power that comes from preserving legacy to suggest a future can’t be any different are seen for the sinister forces that they are and the film extracts the complicated reality that residents of Natchez are put in conflict with one another when the issue between them in the present may not explicitly have to do with the color of their skin, but the desire to move on as if there was nothing to resolve versus a reconciliation with the past when so much of a debt remains. The awkwardness of the situation is perfectly captured by Herbert, who sees the humor in it as much as the pain and while it’s a stroke of genius to relay the history of the area so elegantly through tour guides eager to entertain as much as inform, it is also a shrewd move to keep an eye on Tracy, a trophy wife who relocated to Natchez and became enamored of the lifestyle, though the deterioration of her marriage threatens her high society status. Worthy of a film on her own as nearly any of the people in “Natchez” are, a single moment of her struggling to fit into a car in a giant hoop skirt is the kind of moment of cinematic slapstick that has kept audiences in stitches for time eternal, but couldn’t be any more potent a reflection of how being wedded to the past has gotten in the way of making progress.
“Natchez” will screen again at the Tribeca Festival at the Village East on June 10th at 6:15 pm and June 14th at 6:15 pm.