Isaach de Bankolé, born on the Ivory Coast and trained as an actor in Paris, has built his reputation with movies as different as Jim Jarmusch indies (Night on Earth, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai) and Casino Royale, the James Bond adventure. Although he has a good actor's skill for grabbing attention and earning sympathy, he has ready access to ambiguous facial expressions that allow him to play villains and men of mystery just as well. This ambiguity serves him well in Otomo, a German production from 1999 now available on DVD from ArtMattan Productions.

De Bankolé plays Frederic Otomo, a native of Cameroon who has emigrated to Stuttgart, where he lives in a rented room and ekes out a living with temporary jobs. The precariousness of his life becomes clear in one of the drama's first scenes, when he's turned down for work because he doesn't have the right papers. A little later he's ordered to leave a bus because his ticket doesn't extend to the next city zone. He protests to the ticket checker, who won't give him a break. Then he gets up to go, only to be told "it's too late" and he'll have to receive a summons.

After what he's already been through today, this is too much for Otomo, who gets into a scuffle with the conductor, butting him in the nose and escaping when the bus pulls into a station. But the conductor has held onto Otomo's bag, and soon two cops are on his trail. Wanting only to get away from Stuttgart, he finds a truck driver who'll transport him to the Netherlands for 400 marks. That's a lot more than Otomo has, so he wanders back to the city, hoping he can scrounge up some cash before the police nail him down.

So far, the story of Otomo is based on real events, experienced by an African immigrant who lived in Stuttgart until circumstances led to the burst of violence (also drawn from reality) that climaxes the film. But for the bulk of the movie--between the opening depiction of Otomo's daily life and the highly disturbing finale--director Frieder Schlaich and his co-screenwriter, Klaus Pohl, have invented a might-have-been scenario that casts additional light on Otomo's personality while suggesting the sorts of indignities that may befall a black man in Germany's traditionally white society. The plot gives Otomo some bright moments as well, preventing the drama from becoming a mere polemic.

The central part of the story begins when Otomo sits on a riverside park bench to contemplate his options. A little girl approaches him-as German as can be, with shining blonde hair and crisp blue eyes-to offer him a flower she's picked. Otomo is still a fairly unknown quantity at this point, and for just a moment you can't help thinking of the harrowing scene in Frankenstein (1931) when the monster tosses a friendly child into a river, led by good intentions coupled with sheer misapprehension of the world. This is canny filmmaking on Schlaich's part, inducing even the most liberal-minded viewer to suspect Otomo of monstrous capabilities (i.e., to suspect the worst of a black stranger) until his gentle, good-humored response to the child shows that he's a nice man inside.

This said, we can understand why the girl's grandmother is wary when she notices this new friend. And we can like the woman all the more when she takes Otomo's plight seriously, agreeing to dig up money so he can get away. Things grow more complicated when the girl's mother gets home-she's the only person in the place who doesn't know Otomo's fundamentally good nature-and events start building toward their explosive conclusion. Other interesting elements in the film include Otomo's encounter with a working-class waitress who instinctively helps him, and various details of the cops' personalities. One of them is an amateur rapper with no audible signs of talent.

Otomo isn't a subtle story, and the best that can be said of its sometimes ponderous pace is that the quick-and-shocking climax takes on more power by contrast. De Bankolé shows what strong effects can be gleaned from an understated portrayal of a character who remains a bit of a mystery, though, and the portrait of African travail in European surroundings is impressively unsparing. Also worth noting is the sensitive acting of Eva Mattes, best known for Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder movies of the 1970s, as the grandmother.

The primary extra on this DVD is the feature-length Swiss docudrama Waalo Fendo: There, Where the Earth Freezes, directed by Mohammed Soudani in 1997. With dialogue in the West African language Wolof, supplemented by Italian and French, it tells of two brothers who emigrate from Senegal to Italy, where they earn unreliable income by picking tomatoes, selling cheap fashion items in streets and cafes, and the like.

The story is told mainly in flashback, so we know from the beginning that one brother will meet a sad end. There are many pungent details to be learned, though, including the role played by drug money in the lives of some immigrants. With its fragmented editing, vibrant cinematography, and speeches into the camera, the film recalls some of Jean-Luc Godard's politically charged works, such as Ici et ailleurs (1976) and parts of Weekend (1967), and even more the great ethnographic films of Jean Rouch, who developed methods of reconstructing real-life stories by having participants in the real events act out and comment on their experiences, without pretending to achieve the impossible goal of "objective" realism.

Waalo Fendo tells a fact-based tale not dissimilar to that of Otomo, but does so in a manner that's less cinematically "professional" and more existentially direct. It's a good complement to the DVD's main offering.

For more information about Otomo, visit Facets Multi-Media. To order Otomo, go to TCM Shopping.

by Mikita Brottman and David Sterritt