Film Review: Pariah

Pariah is a very special film. I saw it with my movie maven friend Stan who said it was the best film he’s seen all year. And I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. While the concept – a coming (out)-of-age story – is classic, the family and friendship circle are ones we rarely get to pierce at our local movie houses. For how often does an actual commercial cinema show a film written and directed by a woman of color about African American lesbians? This wasn’t a specialized film festival. Nor a group DVD viewing. But a place that sells popcorn.

No, mostly crap white boy productions get the marquee. Shooting and raping and politicking and drinking and blowing up things – fantasies that reflect little that I understand in my kishkes, as my dad would’ve said, in my guts. Pariah is showing at only one theater in the whole Boston area. It has enjoyed little paid publicity or flashy marketing. Sundance supported it, as did many individuals who contributed some pennies to its Kickstarter campaign.

Alike (Adepero Oduye), a high school junior in Brooklyn, uses poetry to try to sort her identity, her sexuality, and her sense of truth. She knows that she is attracted to women, although she hasn’t yet stepped out with a girl. Her best friend Laura (Pernell Walker - photo at left) is openly gay, and as a result has been thrown out by her own parents. Alike doesn’t want to be alienated from her family, but struggles with the tension of changing her clothes (butching up on the way out, returning to girl’s clothes on the way home) on buses and in bathrooms. Her mother (Kim Wayans - photo at left) is a realistic combo of cold and loving, and wants only to mold her sullen daughter into a church-going lady she can dress up in skirts. Lacking any control in her own relationship with her husband, the mother would prefer to pretend the world is as she would wish it, than to cope with reality. The mother feels disconcertingly familiar.

Alike’s father (Charles Parnell) is rarely home, busy cheating on his wife and working a job he resents. Alike is his favorite and he thinks he is defending her by denying the obvious. Although at the end of the film he is seen to be the good guy, for me he remains a handsome cad, whose charm does not disguise that he is an absentee father and an unfeeling husband who practices his own sense of delusion. He fails to defend Alike at a crucial moment in their unpleasant family dynamic.

Young love can be such a mixed bag and Alike’s first romantic touch is fraught with betrayal and confusion. The line between friendship and desire is a hard one to navigate in those hormone-fueled years. A generalized air of danger and threat out on the streets is palpable. In the end, Alike’s literary commitment pulls her through these rough times, a lifeline writers and artists of every age can imagine.

There is an authenticity to this film that is so superior to the glossy, 3D, hyper-edited jerky work that passes as blockbusters. It’s important to remember how many excellent directors are failing to get their amazing films made. And even when they are made, how few are making it past the festivals and into our newspaper listings.

As funding for the arts gets sliced to bits, the voices of those who are not white men with connections are left unamplified. As it grapples with the secrets and lies of characters I care about and can identify with, Pariah affects me much more profoundly than mainstream fluff.  Kudos to writer-director-producer Dee Rees (photo at left): the efforts just to get this film funded were probably more exhausting than the actual creation and execution of this fine film itself. But ultimately it is a beautifully acted coming-of-age story that is both sweet and bittersweet.

Here’s the trailer:
 

Comments

[Allen Young]

Your enthusiasm for this film, as well as your account of its story, makes me want to go see it. There are theaters in Amherst, Keene and Brattleboro, 35-45 minutes from my home, where it is fairly likely this movie will be played. (We rural folk are not as culturally deprived as some of you city folk might think.) I will keep my eyes open for it. Thanks.

[Sue Katz]

Oh, you'll love it Allen. And I admire your optimism. But like I say, the Kendall is, so far, the only place to see it in greater Boston and I'm not even sure if it'll last to next week.

[Tim Kukler]

Thanks for the heads up about this film!

[Sue Katz]

If you get to see it Tim, let me know what you think.