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Social theorist Georg Simmel wrote that fashion’s power is based on its uncanny combination of imitation and differentiation. Oliver Schmitz’s inspired little gem — a highlight, along with Elaine Epstein’s AIDS documentary State of Denial, of this week’s "Ten Years After: Contemporary South African Cinema" series at the Harvard Film Archive — works along similar lines. The fish-out-of-water tale follows Sox, a yuppie black actor who tries to win a role in an action flick by polishing his street credibility in the ghetto. In mapping Johannesburg’s prickly topography of race and class, Hijack Stories also explores a blurry boundary between artifice and reality: at what point is Sox’s "research" no longer a performance? In so doing, it externalizes the traditional gangster film’s preoccupation with having the right lines, the right swagger, the right clothes. Drawing on such diverse films as Boyz N the Hood, the Michael J. Fox star vehicle The Hard Way, and the Swinging London psychodrama Performance, Schmitz fashions a stylish makeover of the gangster genre. (95 minutes)
BY MATTIAS FREY
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