My partner, Solomon, and I still argue about Gina Prince-Bythewood’s 2000 romance, “Love & Basketball.” The movie tells the story of Monica (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy (Omar Epps), which begins with Monica’s family moving in next door to Quincy’s when they are both 11, follows them as their friendship turns to courtship right before they graduate high school and start playing basketball at U.S.C. Once in college, they juggle off-court drama (Quincy learns that his pro-athlete father has impregnated a woman outside his marriage), and on-court demands (Monica fights to earn her spot as the starting point guard).
These pressures come to a head when Quincy asks Monica to stay up late to help him process his parents’ marital crisis, and Monica, worried about her place on the team, returns to her dorm to make curfew. Dejected, Quincy ultimately decides to leave Monica and college and go pro. Monica, meanwhile, ends up playing basketball in Spain. Years later, they meet again in Los Angeles, and after she loses a pickup game to him, she wins his heart and a starting spot on the Sparks.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as black directors turned to black romances in “Love Jones,” “The Best Man,” “Brown Sugar” and other films, “Love & Basketball” stood out even more for featuring black characters whose ambition (Monica) and craving for domestic bliss (Quincy) challenged traditional gender norms. At the heart of the disagreement between Monica and Quincy — and for that matter, Solomon and me — was our generation’s gender wars gone buppie: Could Monica really win the boy next door, play ball and have it all?
A new crop of heterosexual black love stories — including “The Photograph,” “Premature” and the series “Cherish the Day” — by black filmmakers answers that question with a definitive yes. Though they pay homage to Prince-Bythewood’s vision with African-American female leads as complex, cosmopolitan and curious as Monica, the central conflict of these new stories is whether their characters can work through personal trauma, break free of the “strong black woman” stereotype, and be vulnerable enough to love themselves and their partners. In line with a larger recognition of black women’s multidimensionality in American culture and politics, never once do their male partners make them feel bad for dreaming big: their ambition is their appeal.
Released on Valentine’s Day, “The Photograph,” written and directed by Stella Meghie, involves a pair of love stories told across two generations. In the contemporary one, a New York museum curator named Mae (Issa Rae) meets Michael (Lakeith Stanfield), a journalist who is writing a profile of Christina, a photographer and Mae’s late mother. In 2020, Mae’s flourishing career is a given. In the 1990s-set flashback, Christina leaves her boyfriend, Isaac, to pursue her artistic passion in New York City.
“I think the benefit of having the two characters Christina and Mae is that you can show them going through different things,” Meghie said in an interview. “For Christina, her driving force is figuring out how she was going to be successful careerwise. For Mae, her mom’s success and her dad help her to achieve that. Now, she needs to look at what is missing in her life and what issues that she’s not confronting emotionally within herself. Hers is a more philosophical journey.”
Growing up, Meghie was obsessed with films like “Love Jones” (like Christina, the main character in that 1997 drama was a photographer) and “Love & Basketball.” Later, those films became blueprints for her own screenwriting. “I grew up playing basketball so Monica was a character that I very much saw myself in as an athlete and tomboy who really didn’t know how to date or how to have a boyfriend or how to tell a guy you like them,” Meghie reflected. “And that last scene when she’s like, ‘I’ll play you for your heart.’ It makes me cry still because it is a moment where you realize you can’t just be this strong girl. He’s going to walk away if you don’t show him that you love him.”
In “Premature” (due Feb. 21), the question of whether Ayanna, a 17-year-old Harlem poet, will throw away her ambition for love propels much of the romantic drama. It’s the summer before she’s due to attend college, and her music-producer lover (Joshua Boone) does not want her to sacrifice her education to be with him.
Directed by Rashaad Ernesto Green, who co-wrote it with his star, Zora Howard, the film is the result of what the two saw as a lack of black love stories today, especially those that center on the experiences of young black women.
“One of the things that really drove us to write this story was the very simple fact that we grew up watching love stories in the 1990s with people of color, black people and brown people, in them,” Green said. “In the current landscape, because of what has transpired in this country politically, there has been an overabundance of films that deal with black trauma, victimization, pain and suffering. We wanted to offer a film that dealt with the other side of that narrative, present a story that we felt was universal, and invite people into our lives and our love in a way that we hope is also effective.”
Fortunately, this trend is not just limited to the big screen. Each episode of Ava DuVernay’s latest series, “Cherish the Day” (which premiered Feb. 11 on OWN), follows a single day of a young couple’s romance over five years. Revolving around the relationship between Evan (Alano Miller), a Stanford-educated, Tesla-driving tech engineer, and Gently (Xosha Roquemore), a bohemian, globe-trotting caregiver from South Los Angeles, it appears at first to be a story about opposites attracting.
But, as the show’s format intentionally accelerates the timeline, we quickly learn that Gently’s carefreeness is not a drawback to Evan but rather an inspiration for his entrepreneurship and an indicator of her hard-earned freedom in life and love. In turn, Gently is now front and center, unlike past characters whose whimsical natures would have them sidelined as comic relief (think Freddie from “A Different World” or Lynn from “Girlfriends”).
Evan “fits into what we usually see in our iterations of black love,” Roquemore said. “He’s fiscally successful and highly educated — those stories in which black people have to be perfect.”
Unlike Evan, whose parents have been married for 40 years, Gently is raised by a family friend who takes her in after her father’s gang-related death and her substance-abusing mother abandons her. “Instead of Gently being hardened by her background, it makes her more eclectic or freer or makes her want to travel the world,” Roquemore said. “She’s trying to channel that pain into something else, which I think is just a little more realistic.”
Noting that few Hollywood writers depict black women as both vulnerable and aspirational, Roquemore touched on how clichéd so many stories are still: “Because I live my life as a black woman that is multifaceted, Gently is so very familiar to me. When people are like, ‘Whoa, what is this? I’ve never met anyone like this!’ No, they’ve just never seen it on TV.”
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
