Themes of guilt, punishment and redemption are common currency in prison dramas, but Petra Volpe’s terrific Frank & Louis looks at the issue from entirely unexpected and wholly moving perspective. The follow-up to the hospital-set Berlinale hit Late Shift — submitted by Switzerland as its International Oscar hope this year — Volpe’s new film is another treatise on caring for the vulnerable and the toll it can take. The institution this time, however, is an American correctional facility, and the focus of the story is the relationship that forms between two Black criminals, both convicted of serious crimes.
The start of the film sees Frank Baker (Kingsley Ben-Adir) being brought by transfer to a new prison, wearing a bright orange jumpsuit, handcuffs and ankle chains. Little things tell you that Frank has been in the system for a while, like the little privileges he gets — an extra roll of toilet paper — when checking in. Frank unpacks with military precision and quickly makes the spartan space his own; neat but unfussy. Now in his 40s, Frank has been in prison for almost his whole adult life, spending 17 years in solitary for assaulting two of his fellow inmates. One gets the sense that that Frank is long gone, a suspicion confirmed when he is interviewed for a position on the medical wing.
“Are you patient?” Frank is asked, and though he seems to have worked through his old anger problems, it’s certainly possible that he’s underestimating his capacity to deal with what’s about to happen: he’s signing up to help with patients suffering with dementia. “You need to be pretty sure you can handle it,” he is told, and the first day does not go well. Frank is assigned to Louis Nelson (Rob Morgan), a once fierce and feared inmate who aggressively refuses his help, yelling, “Get out of my cell!” when Frank enters. Frank is daunted and steps back, but the other staffers pull him up. “You’ve got to engage,” says one.
Louis’s behavior is puzzling to the inmates, who think of dementia as the last stop before death (“He ain’t even that old…”). But the closer he gets to him, Frank begins to see what’s going on; Louis’s mind is slowly disintegrating, and the increasingly infrequent bouts of lucidity just reinforce how quickly it’s happening. Louis is not the only one; his Puerto Rican colleague Julian (René Pérez Joglar) looks after a white supremacist whose latent racism explodes from time to time Julian takes this abuse in his stride. “Little by little, there will be nothin’ left up there,” he explains, tapping his head. “Not even the hate.”
With this one line, Julian neatly summarizes the direction Volpe’s film is about to take. Given its set-up, one might think that this will be a film about toxic masculinity, using Black crime as a petri dish. That’s certainly a topic that’s up for discussion and is raised by Frank’s conviction — for killing a man while taking part as an accomplice in an armed robbery — at the age of 18. But as he cares for Louis, Frank begins to see himself in the increasingly vulnerable older man, whose condition makes him an easy target for revenge attacks.
What Frank sees happening to Louis is what makes this insightfully scripted and perfectly acted two-hander so special. He realizes that Louis no longer knows where he is and why he’s there, and that, at some later point, he will be packed off to a lonely death in a care home. But right now, he is in limbo — unaware of his crime, unaware of his guilt — and Volpe’s film rather brilliantly explores the consequences of that. Dementia is the ultimate in solitary confinement, and Frank sees this in Louis, always waiting for a visit from his daughter, always waiting for letters that never come. What kind of a life is that?
Things come to a head for Frank when he finally gets his parole hearing and is shamed by the impact statement given by his victim’s daughter. Frank has always claimed diminished responsibility for his actions, but, seeing what’s happening to Frank, Louis begins to understand a thing or two about the dangers of denial in the most extreme way imaginable. The payoff is bleak but not entirely without hope and leaves the viewer with a moral maze to find their way out of, if an exit even exists. Is a man still morally guilty if his mind is empty? Can he be punished if he doesn’t know what the punishment is and what it’s for? Frank & Louis is the movie equivalent of Gil Scott-Heron’s haunting song “Pieces of a Man”; one of the best new films at Sundance and one of the best of the year so far.
Title: Frank & Louis
Festival: Sundance (Premieres)
Sales: TrustNordisk
Director: Petra Biondina Volpe
Screenwriters: Petra Biondina Volpe, Esther Bernstorff
Cast: Kingsley Ben-Adir, Rob Morgan, René Pérez Joglar, Rosalind Eleazar, Indira Varma
Running time: 1 hr 35 mins