And the externship hysteria is overrrrr!! Hurray for everyone! What a marvelous relief for my classmates and me. This is one of those moments—rare in graduate school—when we really get to bask in the warm glow of our accomplishments. Most externships don’t start until June, some (most importantly MINE) don’t start until after Labor Day. So, unlike most grad school deadlines and milestones, which just necessitate more work immediately after their attainment, my classmates and I can now merely savor the anticipation of the freaking awesome work we’re going to be doing this time next year, without having to bust our asses in the present. It’s pretty sweet.
In other hyper-awesome news: I’m giving another lecture on Friday (depression and suicidality again, wheeee!), and epic planning is happening for my DISSERTATION. Oh yes. I’m so badass that I can’t be satisfied with JUST ONE major research project; I need to work on TWO. SIMULTANEOUSLY. (PsychoCinematic insider's tip: A high rate of CAPSLOCK usage is indicative of BARELY SUBLIMATED ANXIETY. JUST FYI.)
Seriously though, it’s going to be pretty cool. Details to come.
Moving along: for today’s post, I’m going to do a throwback to a movie I actually saw a few months ago. While listening to some back-podcasts recently (specifically, back-issues of the absolutely fantastic Michel Martin’s "Tell Me More"), I heard an interview with Ntozake Shange, who wrote the choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf”. This reminded me of how strongly I responded to the film version, directed by Tyler Perry, with the truncated title of “For Colored Girls” (2010). Since it was the 52nd film I saw last year, I feel even more obligated to write a little something about the film, however belatedly.
First of all, a comment on translating works meant for the stage to the screen: It’s usually a disaster. One particularly painful and relatively recent example of this was “Doubt” (2008). I expected it to be spectacular—how can you possibly go wrong with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman??—but, sadly, it fell very flat.
Theater and cinema are in many ways at odds with each other. Theater is about sharing a space with actors performing a piece that lives, breathes, and is lost the minute the curtain falls. It’s about movement within a confined space. Movies, on the other hand, are eternally set one certain way (excluding the occasional director’s cut or alternate ending), and they can be set absolutely anywhere the imagination (with the occasional aid of special effects technicians) is capable of. If a play is going to be successfully translated to the screen, I feel like these differences have to be acknowledged. If you shoot a movie of a play without taking advantage of the unique and different strengths of your new medium, it can feel to the audience as if they’re merely watching a recorded version of a theater performance. This was my experience watching “Doubt,” feeling immensely disappointed. It’s off-putting.
“For Colored Girls,” I am very pleased to say, does not suffer from this problem. Much of the film is shot in painfully intimate close-up, lingering on the lovely faces of the women who comprise the film’s rainbow—economizing on a perspective not available to theater-goers seated beyond the first or second rows. There are also passages of beautiful—and horrifying—movement, recapitulating the movement of actors across a stage. Furthermore, there are tracts of dialogue recorded in such a way that I could almost taste their flavor, as if they were being spoken in the darkened theater instead of fed through speakers. Nyla (Tessa Thompson) effortlessly glides over her monologue with a blissful spoken-word rhythm as she dances with her troupe of high school classmates, and Crystal (Kimberly Elise) slowly draws a bottle away from her explosive, alcoholic husband with a painstakingly even whisper. Indeed, in spite of the movie’s success in moving Ms. Shange’s choreopoem to the silver screen, I’ll admit I found myself hungering for a live performance so I could bathe in her beautiful prose in vivo. Hopefully I’ll be able to enjoy that sometime.
That particular gold star aside, the film boasts many other successes. The all-star cast is ever magnetic and watchable, each woman giving voice to often-voiceless aspects of feminine experience. In her interview, Ms. Shange said she wrote “For Colored Girls” to allow silent women to speak, and in this she expertly, painfully, and powerfully succeeds. Without ruining critical turns of the plot, I must say this is by far one of the most wrenching films I’ve ever seen. It marches boldly and unblinkingly through terrain the bravest angels would fear to tread.
As much as it is a validation and ultimate celebration of womanly resilience and strength, “For Colored Girls” is arguably also an encyclopedia of the atrocities of which men are capable against women. With the film’s concluding loving and healing huddle of women, I was left—perhaps deliberately—unsettled. While the audience is left reassured that women can find strength and solace in other women, those of us who seek partners in men were probably pretty freaked out. I know I was. If men are capable of such barbarity—with no positive male counterpoint to be seen, save one character’s barely-present husband—where does that leave us?
In responding to a query about the frightfulness of the male characters in this film, Ms. Elise responded, “If you’re going to examine issues like domestic abuse or rape or anything, you’re going to have a bad guy in the picture. The point is, these things happen to women. How do we heal from that? How do we move on? How do we strengthen ourselves, and empower ourselves, when we find ourselves in these situations? And you know, to tell it honestly, you have to go there.”
...Fair enough.
She is, by the way, completely unforgettable in this movie.
Perhaps paradoxically, if anything, this is definitely the kind of movie that made me grateful for all of the men in my life who are gentle, loving, and safe-place making—the man I come home to, the men who are my father, brothers, cousins, uncles, grandfather, and teachers, and the men who are some of my dearest friends. Even if this particular movie offers no immediate proof of good men, I count myself as immensely blessed to have such a plurality of evidence that they exist. Thank the Universe for that, or it might have taken me much longer to shake the solemn, heavy feeling in my heart as I left the theater.
That cheery, upbeat review aside, this is definitely one worth watching. I gave it a 4.
’Til next time.
<3
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