Showing posts with label Tamar-kali. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tamar-kali. Show all posts

Monday, March 25, 2024

SHIRLEY***


Writer-director John Ridley (12 YEARS A SLAVE) has created a straightforward but nonetheless important biopic of the pathbreaking American politician Shirley Chisholm. It features a powerhouse performance by Regina King (IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK), ably supported by Terrence Howard (HUSTLE & FLOW) and Lance Reddick (The Wire).

Regina's Shirley is a self-motivated, powerful, centred, charismatic woman who fills every inch of the screen. It's testament to both the real woman and the performance that we somehow believe in her chances to take the Democratic nomination for the 1972 Presidential election. Those of us who know our US political history know that this battle was in some ways beside the point, because Nixon would go on to win in a landslide and probably would've done whoever the Dems put up against him. BUT Shirley's career importance is so much more than the immediate campaign or the proximate goal. She was the first black woman to be successful and visible on the political stage at a time when it was dominated by white men. She inspired a next generation of activist politicians. You don't get AOC without Shirley.

This film efficiently essays what Shirley was up against. The scepticism of her own Party - a lack of finances - opposition even from black MALE political leaders. Seeing her up against the DNC machine makes one think of how the cards were stacked against Bernie Sanders, or how somehow Biden remains on the ticket this year. 

But I guess in a way that's my criticism of the film. It's just all so efficient and competently made. There is no kinetic passion of the kind that MUST have propelled Shirley to continue against insurmountable odds. I guess I wanted a more imaginative freer hand at the helm of this film. But maybe the material is so important that is stifles that creative freedom.

SHIRLEY has a running time of 117 minutes and is rated PG-13.

Monday, October 10, 2022

AFTER SHERMAN - BFI London Film Festival - Day 6


AFTER SHERMAN is a stunning new documentary from director Jon Sesrie Goff that's insightful, provocative and often visually stunning. His camera roams through the landscape of coastal South Carolina looking at the rural areas where his ancestors were slaves, and where after emancipation they were promised freedom on their own newly acquired plots of land. It's rare to find a film that feels so rooted in the land, and so well understands how our cultural and racial roots can be so liminal for those of third, fourth, fifth generations that somehow the rootedness of property - even property in a land that enslaved or colonised you - can become hyper-important and symbolic.  I see that same search for a physical representation of belonging and birthright in the Asian diaspora too.

What is shocking for a British viewer, not as well versed as one might be in contemporary and historic race-relations in the South, is how far the relationship to a particular state might remain fraught. We see it again and again in this documentary, with people discussing their decisions to leave the South and head North for jobs - their experience of comparative racism in either place - and sometimes, in their decision to head back "home".  One of the most powerful moments is a casual conversation among contemporary young black Americans discussing where to live, and you just realise the weight of politics that sits within that conversation.

The documentary is also powerful for showing us how the fight for civil rights is intertwined with the black church, and its central role as a rallying point, community builder, and truly self-owned institution in a world where few if any institutions are open to the black community.  To see some members of the church express faith, deep faith, and the ability to forgive, is humbling - if perhaps baffling - to a person of no faith.  That centredness on the church stems from Jon Sesrie Goff using conversations with his father, a minister, as a framing device and through line for his film.  That I left this film feeling a sense of hope and understanding, despite the fact that it frankly discusses racially motivated violence, is a tribute to all involved. 

AFTER SHERMAN has a running time of 88 minutes. The film played Tribeca 2022 and is playing the BFI London Film Festival.

Saturday, October 10, 2020

SHIRLEY - BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Day 3


SHIRLEY is the most remarkable film I have seen all year - as stylish, slippery and dangerous as the writer whose fictionalised inner life it portrays.  It's filled with riotous rebellious performances and deep empathy for smart women who just won't lie down. 

The centre of the film is a phenomenal performance from Elisabeth Moss (THE HANDMAID'S TALE) as the notorious, brilliant author Shirley Jackson (The Lottery, The Haunting At Hill House).  When we meet her, Shirley is already an infamous author of dangerously dark works, earning far more than her husband, Professor Stanley Hyman. But she's also undone by depression and writer's block - visibly dishevelled, scabrous and scared to leave the house.  Meanwhile her husband (Michael Stuhlbarg) is one of those aggressively extrovert characters who might seem charming at first, but is both supportive of his wife's brilliance but also capable of nasty jealousy-inflected put-downs. He also consciously uses his buffoonish behaviour to get way too close and handsy with other women. But the brilliance of this film is to show how the couple really does love each other and respect each other.  Shirley knows Stanley cheats, and even though she hates it, she'll protect him from others exploiting that fact. And most importantly of all for a couple who live by their words, it is HIS opinion of her writing that she respects most of all.  To that end, the relationship reminded me of Leonard and Virginia Woolf as much as of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

The fatal mistake of young Rose Nemser (Odessa Young) is to think that Shirley really does hate her husband and that she can drive a wedge between them. Poor Rose doesn't realise that while Shirley might be fascinated by her youth, and courage in sticking around despite the barbs, at some point she will force "the children" out because she has what she needs for her book. But then again, Rose also gets something out of the relationship.  When we meet her, she is a beautifully put together young wife of a young assistant professor (Logan Lerman) moving in temporarily with Jackson and Hyman while they find a place to stay.  Hyman begs them to stay longer rent-free and help look after his sick wife. Rose is pregnant and has dropped out of university and Shirley mocks her for it.  But as Rose wins Shirley's trust and they both start investigating the disappearance of a young college girl called Paula, we see the three ladies merge into one.  Shirley starts to become more put together - her hair less wild - and she starts to write again. She also imagines Rose as the disappeared Paula. And Rose becomes ragged, weighed down by pregnancy, heat, her husband's indifference and then infidelity. But she also knows more about herself and her husband and has found an inner strength and her own barbed tongue!  More profoundly, we realise that all three women are in the same position. All three have expectations of what they will be, how they will look, what barriers society will place on where and how they can be smart.  They are asked to live circumscribed lives, and is it surprising that this drives them mad?

The central performances are all stunning here, not least from Odessa Young as Rose who holds her own against Moss and Stuhlbarg.  But let's spend some time on how phenomenal Josephine Decker's direction is.  It's slippery and ambitious and deeply empathetic.  The camera is kinetic and intimate and seems to get under the skin of the characters.  For a film that's basically about four people taking around a dinner table in a single house, it never felt claustrophobic or static, unless it very deliberately wanted to be.  And kudos to the production designer too, for making a house that heaves and pens in and can feel sinister and prison-like. I loved everything about how imaginative this film was, and how the real and imagined were allowed to intertwine.  Finally, kudos to the costume designer Amela Baksic who so brilliantly uses dress and hairstyle to convey the expectations society had of women at this time, and to visually delineate each woman's state of mind as it evolves through the film.

SHIRLEY is rated R and has a running time of 107 minutes. It played Sundance, Berlin and London 2020.  It opened in the US this summer, and will open in the UK on October 30th.