The Last Tree: Emily Haworth-Booth

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OMG I can't believe this!!! It actually got me teary in the end! I have to admit, initially while glimpsing the thumbnail of the book cover, I honestly thought it were two little birdies on it lmao. It was until I started actually reading that I realized the figures are boys. The art style is easy to warm up to though! The children talked to their parents about the tree and how it made them feel, but their parents wouldn’t listen. To satisfy their parents’ desire for more wood, the children secretly cut down boards from the wall and brought them to their parents. There’s a strong Moonlight vibe about much of this, though Amoo’s 2013 sci-fi short Touch, where golden fields are similarly a joyous space for his characters, suggests it’s also his own rapidly developing visual style. The up-close sound design – wind in the trees, sudden breaths, the blood beating in Femi’s ears – puts the viewer almost inside his head. But the film doesn’t deliver the immersive experience of a brutalising childhood with the all-round originality that Jeremiah Zagar’s recent We the Animals musters.

But the friends soon wanted to build shelters. The shelters became houses, then the houses got bigger. All too soon they wanted to control the environment and built a huge wooden wall around the community. Their actions upon finding the little tree got to me. It was phrased so very simple, but I can practically hear the awe in the exclamation. Read this book, cherish trees, folks!But when the children crept out beyond the wall and found one another by the little tree, they laughed and played. They tended the tree, and each day it grew taller and prouder. Writer-director Amoo’s plot takes on a generic gang-tale feel, however, as Femi is recruited by local gangster Mace (Demmy Ladipo). From early on, we understand that violence, from Yinka’s canings to the ‘punishment beatings’ he metes out on Mace’s behalf, is the price Femi pays for adult attention. A group of friends finds a lovely forest to make their homes. The children played among the trees and slept on the forest floor. But, when the weather changed, the friends needed firewood. Then because they needed firewood, there was more space for the wind and rain and snow to come in. So, then they used more wood to make shelters and finally more wood to make cabins. Eventually, all that was left was one tiny, little tree. This story reminded me a bit of THE LORAX in which greed takes over and there are no trees left in the town of Thneedville. In this new village, there are no trees left, but one lonely, little tree that no one thinks is worth anything until the parents in the village decide they still need more wood and send the children out to cut it down and the children refuse, instead bringing the wood from the fenced wall. Writer-director Shola Amoo’s “semi-autobiographical” second feature is an affecting coming-of-age tale pitched somewhere between the sublime American poetry of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight and the streetwise British grit of Noel Clarke and Menhaj Huda’s Kidulthood movies. A huge leap forward from the experimental collages of 2016’s A Moving Image (which Amoo has accurately called a “feature-length, multimedia, visual-art project”), The Last Tree bristles with film-making confidence, plunging us into the world of its young protagonist as he struggles to find his place in a strangely changing environment. Powerful performances, tactile visuals and an elegantly fluid score add to the impact of this impressively understated yet profoundly moving tale.

With nothing to look at but a wall, the villagers changed. They forgot their games and songs, and became cold and hard. They became suspicious of one another. Despite this, the film opts to show him dabbling rather than diving into lawlessness – shoplifting, enforcing Mace’s beatings, acting as a bemused lookout during a violent crime – which is a useful reminder that teenage life is mutable. Not every ‘lieutenant’ inevitably opts to stay with the gang. Nonetheless, it gives the plotting an oddly uncommitted air. Sound design plays a crucial role, too, with Femi’s fractured worldview dramatised through a richly textured mosaic of noise that slips from closeup voices and amplified ambient creaks to muffled booms giving the impression of being submerged underwater. It’s as if we can hear the blood rushing in Femi’s ears as he wrestles with self-definition, reminding us of Mahershala Ali’s haunting refrain from Moonlight: “At some point, you gotta decide for yourself who you’re gonna be.” Tai Golding’s still and wary performance as the younger Femi keenly conveys a child emotionally dislocated by being surrendered by the only mother he’s known into Yinka’s strict Nigerian care. Mothering and its inevitable failings form one of the film’s central themes, as Yinka’s beatings and perennial despair at his behaviour leave Femi emotionally shut down and resentful of Mary’s perceived betrayal. His sharp first-person perspective shapes the film, a subjective portrait often delivered, in its urban sections, in unsettling low-angled close-ups on its hero, Spike Lee-style. They’re happy playing among the trees and sleeping on the mossy ground until winter comes. They cut down branches for firewood.

BookBliss

From the author of the phenomenally successful The King Who Banned the Dark comes a new tale about community and our relationship with the environment and nature.

Even though Amoo’s interest is in arthouse feels rather than genre thrills, his narrative sometimes seems disjointed, its concentration displaced into visual flourishes. Spanning Lincolnshire, London and (for a tantalisingly brief period) Lagos, the film differentiates each setting with a distinctive visual and sonic signature. Golden light, saturated colours and lush orchestration wrap around Femi’s childhood rural idyll, while Mace’s bolthole pulses with red light in the grey bulwark of a council estate. Lagos buzzes with city chaos, then the moneyed stillness of Femi’s biological father’s vast house. This book would be wonderful for generating discussion on the themes of taking care of our environment, working together, community and friendship. It also highlights the power children can have and use when they are given the opportunity to do so. They took the wall down, planted seeds and tended the saplings. They talked and sang, and as their children grew, a new forest grew with them.

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Watching The Last Tree for the second time, I thought I detected echoes of Chris Doyle’s shimmering work for Wong Kar-wai in director of photography Stil Williams’s terrifically expressive cinematography. Widescreen, hand-held closeups and the regular use of slow-mo place us inside Femi’s experience, with the super-saturated colours of those early Lincolnshire scenes contrasting with the starker hues of London life and the emotional melee of a late-in-the-day trip to Lagos. Each location has its own distinct personality but everything is filtered through Femi’s changing frame of mind. There are visual nods to the iconic final scene of Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups and a sly invocation of Spike Lee’s trademark “gliding walk” dolly shots, but such references feel organic rather than intrusive. They need more protection from the weather so they chop down trees to build shelters. When their shelters aren’t warm enough, they chop down more trees to build cabins.

Then they found the forest. It was perfect. The leaves gave shelter from the sun and rain, and a gentle breeze wound through the branches. When summer returned, the sun was hot but there weren’t enough trees for shade. The people cut down more branches to make porches.The Last Tree” is an ecological fable for children. The story begins when a group of friends look for a place to live and settle in a forest. So by the time we find Femi again at 16, now played by a brooding Sam Adewunmi, he’s grown a carapace of hard-man masculinity. Listening secretly to The Cure while telling friends it’s Tupac, he’s learned to hide his soft underbelly. They boarded up their windows and built fences, but when the wind rushed into the village, the people ran outside and saw that in spite of all their new wood, the last tree still stood.