Surprising as it might seem to those who've only seen Hondo's earlier films, this is very much a musical. The film is slicker, larger more choreographed than 'Soleil O', and feels at once theatrical and totally filmic. A run-through of the history of the Francophone Caribbean, and a political argument against dependence on and migration to France, in a sense, it sets Soleil O's Pan-African migrant experience in a more specific context and extends the more pageant-like chronological fables that pepper the former film to greater length, using Daniel Boukman's play as its basis. Shot inside an enormous, life-size ship constructed inside a factory, seen in the opening shots, the film-both for practical purposes (there would be no other way to film it), and for structural ones-reveals its own set. Hondo has actors double multiple roles; further doubling occurs in presenting multiple spaces and time frames in this single, capacious structure. As such, 'West Indies' borrows two important conventions of stage plays that are generally left out of film, with its greater flexibility of available actors and available space. In doing so, it turns these conventions into a potent comment on a history in which the same basic colonial power relations are perpetually retained under a different guise; in presenting the ship as both the metropolitan centre and the (post)colonial periphery, Paris and the Caribbean, it amplifies their connections; in staging all of this is in a giant factory, it suggests the ways in which the raw materials worked at through slave and post-slave labour were always at the heart of, and entrapped within, the industrial potency they enabled. The music and choreography are elaborate, slick, witty and moving all at once; I can think of little like this.
