Motor City Madness

DETROIT: WILD CITY (2011) (B+) - This thoughtful documentary toddles around devastated Detroit during the depths of the recession and discovers both despair and hope. The result is an errant snapshot of a city that might be in transition.

The only film on the resume of French filmmaker Florentine Tillon, "Wild City" is often visually arresting. The camera glides and floats, producing a dreamlike quality to the storytelling. Unidentified narrators from local neighborhoods are often presented as detached voices. Sights and sounds speak volumes. A decaying sign asks the haunting question "How would you survive the end of the world?" Tillon unspools a newsreel report about the auto capital from the early 20th century, and he segues from the narrator's booming oration declaring "Time marches on" to a shot of a modern strip mall and the gaudy storefront of Happy's Pizza.  That dry sense of humor lifts the viewer's spirits. 

And Tillon tells some fascinating stories from the dark corners of the industrial wasteland. The camera tracks blocks and blocks of abandoned warehouses and apartment complexes, ducking into dank structures and stumbling on fascinating scenes. One place contains a whole floor full of boxes of the same book, some inspirational paperback, many copies having been used as kindling by squatters. We also hang out with a couple of guys tossing expired appliances out the window of the upper floors of a ghosted apartment building. 

The most fascinating segments involve urban farmers, as Tillon taps into the nascent movement that has been drawing a lot of millennials to Detroit in the past decade or so. The filmmaker expertly contrasts that back-to-basics industriousness with the artifice of the gaudy, insular four-tower Renaissance Center that allows suburbanites to hide in the middle of the city, shielded from the blight during their workday. 

The film, oddly, can feel detached from the vast swaths of the populace. Buildings, landscapes and critters are more prominent than residents are. The overwhelming proportion of featured residents are white. It's as if Tillon purposely chose not to wallow in the plight of urban blacks. 

The final face and voice belongs to a black bartender. He eloquently captures the essence of Tillon's apparent thesis with this tale: Three hundred years ago, he points out, Canadians migrated to this undeveloped prairie and built an industrial kingdom that brought riches to the barons of business and created a secure middle class. Fifty years after that way of life collapsed, leaving a gutted urban homeland, as nature threatens to reaffirm its dominion, a new breed of pioneers is drawn to the challenge of creating a new community for a new age. 

This movie refuses to scoff at such audacity or at a grizzled bartender's willingness to welcome the next generation with open arms and, perhaps, a cold microbrew.