Despite some flaws, Burning Cane is a remarkale first work from a 19-year-old flimmaker

Apparently Phillip Youmans, the director, writer, and cinematographer of the recent Netflix movie, Burning Cane (2019) is only 19 years old. Pretty good! He's obviously precocious and well on his way to a career in film-making, although this movie is far from perfect. On the plus side, PY does a great job from the first sequence showing us the social and geographical milieu in which he's working: the flatlands of the Louisiana sugar-can fields and a small village of black families who work in and around these fields. The central characters are middle-aged woman who seriously overweight and out of shape, a heavy smoker (as is just about everyone in the film) who at the start is concerned about home remedies for the "mange" affecting her dog; he son, an alcoholic and sometimes violent man who's spending a lot time supposedly raising his son; the boy, maybe about 6-8 years old, devoted to his dad but suffering from his dad's rage and unreliability, and the local preacher, recently widowed, who has some kind of relationship with the grandmother. With this set-up we have some powerful and disturbing scenes of violence, drinking, and general degradation; we feel sorrow and pity for these people locked into their world of poverty and suffering, and the promise of peace and salvation that the church offers really is a sham, hardly believed in even by the penitent (and even by the preacher himself - a bit of a Bergman-like crisis of faith here). Where the movie misses a few steps in its possibly intentional ambiguity: Did the preacher kill his wife? Is he in some kind of amorous relationship with the grandmother? Are any of the maladies affecting those in the village cause by the smoke from the burning can in the fields? What is the young boy's mother hardly in the picture? And when exactly is this movie set? 1980? Ambiguity is one thing - but incomprehensibility is something else, and the failure to clarify some of these (and other) plot points makes the movie feel too raw, undeveloped. I could add a few other quibbles, bu it's best to take this movie as is for its strength: A look at life in a community on the verge of extinction and at families on the verge of implosion, a film that literally could not have been made by anyone without first-hand familiarity - through experience or family history - with this material and setting.