By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 5 cats
Director: Dee Rees
Starring: Aasha Davis | Adepero Oduye | Charles Parnell | Kim Wayans | Pernell Walker | Sahra Mellesse
Country: united_states
Year: 2011
Running time: 86
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1233334/
Michael says: “Saw PARIAH last week, and I want to urge anyone who is heading out to the movies this week to try to catch it before nominations. PARIAH is the story of a young African-American lesbian in high school who is struggling with parents growing apart, keeping her sexuality a secret from her family, and falling in love for the first time. One reviewer compared it to PRECIOUS, which really annoyed me. It wasn’t that it was a bad review, but the critic pointed out that Alike, the lead in PARIAH didn’t have it as difficult as Precious. Well, the two movies have very little in common, and comparing them is fairly ridiculous. It reminded me more of OUR SONG, James McKay’s fantastic feature where Kerry Washington really got her break out role, about life for teenage girls coming-of-age in New York City. Alike is a terrific protagonist, and Adepero Oduye brings her magnificently to life on the screen. Her emotions run hot and cold at the drop of a hat, they way they do for most teenagers. The rest of the cast is wonderful too, including Pernell Walker as Laura, Alike’s best friend who is more comfortable with her sexuality and whose story we get to share as it unfolds next to Alike’s. Kim Wayans and Charles Parnell do a great job in Alike’s less that supportive, and preoccupied with themselves parents. Aasha Davis is charming and complex as the surprising object of Alike’s affections. But major props must also go to Dee Rees, PARIAH’S writer/director, who gives us a coming-of-age story from a point-of-view a lot of us don’t get to see on screen very often. And does it with honesty, gentleness, optimism and hope. PARIAH is a great mine for nominations, and I hope enough people get to see it. 5 cats”
Jason says: “Films about contemporary youth are tricky things; as much as many filmmakers would like to make a great one, it’s a rare thing for a filmmaker to be both close enough in age to the teenage characters of a story like this to have a clear view inside their heads and have honed their skills enough to tell the story this well. So the word done by Dee Rees here is even more impressive; she’s managed to make a pretty fantastic film despite not being much older than her main character.
“That character is Alike ‘Lee’ Freeman (Adpero Oduye), a seventeen-year-old girl from Brooklyn with good grades, an interest in poetry, and a family that has its frictions but is more intact than many. The latest and largest source of that friction is Laura (Pernell Walker), a dropout that Alike has been spending a lot of time with; she likes other girls and from what they do when hanging out together, it looks like Alike is starting to lean in that direction. Alike’s father Arthur (Charles Parnell) avoids the issue, but mother Audrey (Kim Wayans) decides to lay down the law, banning Laura from the house and insisting Alike walk to and from school with Bina (Aasha Davis), a nice young lady from their church.
“The obvious place to start when talking about this movie is Adpero Oduye, who is close to perfect as Alike. Part of it is her look; she’s just androgynous enough in appearance to potentially register as a boy in the low-lit opening scenes where she’s wearing bulky, shapeless clothes, signalling early on that this isn’t a phase, but that she isn’t like most girls. A larger part, though, is the attitude she brings to the character; Alike can be a sullen, combative teen, but there’s a large part of her that is not truly cynical yet. She’s smart both inside and outside the classroom, and her self-awareness makes the character more interesting; we can see that she recognizes the sort of isolation she’s heading for.
“The film doesn’t rest entirely on her back; the supporting cast is ectually quite good. Oduye, Parnell, Wayans, and Sahra Mellesse (as younger sister Sharonda) feel like a family from the first time we meet them, with plenty of existig issues and connections appearing in a perfectly natural way. Parnell’s Arthur and Wayans’s Audrey, whose marriage is already strained as the movie starts, are an intriguing pair of opposites: Audrey is proactive but inflexible, just incapable of understanding how she’s becoming the villain, while Arthur doesn’t so much have different beliefs as he refuses to make a principled stand where his daughter is concerned. Parnell makes it clear that Arthur is actively refusing to see what’s in front of his face.
“As much as the cast and filmmakers seem to do a great job of capturing what it’s like to be a young, gay, African-American woman or one of the people around her – the details ring true, even if the descriptors don’t apply – where I think Rees truly shines is with the relationships at the center of the movie, which do have something universal to them: Laura is more of a mentor to Alike than an actual partner, and it’s worth noting that pretty much everything we learn about her has to do with her sexual orientation, and that’s clearly not enough for Alike, who is drawn to someone with whom she has more in common. For many movies, that might be enough, or they might have rejection send Alike realize that Laura is the one for her. Rees, though, handles it with more nuance, effectively making the case that nobody is defined by just one thing – but when that one thing can be a pretty big deal, especially when someone else treats it cavalierly. It’s something that perhaps works best with gay characters, but it works for more than that.
“Getting that bit at the core right makes it much easier to forgive its roughness in other places – the end is a bit of a fortunate escape hatch, for instance. Just by the nature of the story, a lot of the most crucial scenes are shot in dark environs on grainy film stock (or digital processed to look like it), which obscures the climax a bit. The size of a number of locations limits where the camera can go. The filmmakers work within those limits very well, though; even when the physical barriers aren’t there, they keep the same tight, restricted look and feel without going overboard.
“And that’s important; PARIAH is a movie about how kids like Alike feel now, not how they remember feeling filtered through later experience. Dee Rees does an exceptional job of getting the audience into Alike’s head and life, and it’s all the more interesting for lacking much exaggeration or other distortion. 5 cats
“Seen 19 January 2012 in Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run, 35mm)”