Rasheed
Smith lives in Detroit, so his destiny is pretty set. However, there could be
slight variations, depending on whether he becomes an architect or a drug lord.
Either way, Detroit is still Detroit. Qasim Basir follows both parallel lives
in the Blind Chance-like (in terms of
narrative) Destined (trailer here), which opens today
in Los Angeles.
In
one strand of fate, Rasheed the aspiring drug dealer is busted and goes
straight. In the other, the more fleet of foot Sheed escapes to master his
trade and work his way up the ladder. In both versions, he is good to his
mother, but she is more crack-prostitute-ish in the drug kingpin storyline,
even though Sheed is the one who could afford to move her out of the projects.
In
both narratives, Ra/Sheed is poised to reach the big time in their respective careers,
by making Faustian bargains. Sheed the dealer is about to strike a deal with a
dodgy South American cartel to supply an expected influx of new gentrification
residents, whereas Rasheed has been tapped to serve as the figurehead on a redevelopment
project that would turn his old housing project into luxury condos. In each
storyline, characters seem bizarrely confident swarms of yuppies are eager to
colonize the most blighted block of inner city Detroit.
Naturally,
certain characters reappear in each respective branch of fate, including the
extraordinary underwhelming Mayor Jones, played with slimy obsequiousness by CSI New York’s Hill Harper. However, there
are times when the duality does not make sense, such as Jesse Metcalfe’s Dylan
Holder, who is the narc dogging Sheed in one possible destiny and the entitled
son of Rasheed’s real estate developer boss in the other.
Frankly,
Destined is more like Star Trekian
alternate universes than Blind Chance-istic
diverging tributaries of fate. In any event, the fatalism of Kieswloski’s film
perfectly suited Martial Law-era Poland. Indeed, there are obvious reasons why
the Polish masterpiece was withheld from public release since its completion in
1981 until early 1987. In the case of Destined,
Basir’s determination to bring the two strands together feels like hollow pretentiousness.
As a further frustration, the two alternate timelines are not clearly
stylistically delineated, which frequently causes confusion.
