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Tuesday 9 April 2019

Day 346: Monday Reviews - She's Gotta Have It

Spike Lee’s 1986 debut feature She’s Gotta Have It is a sultry, vivacious, and emotionally honest slice of filmmaking joy.

It is the story of Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), a young woman living in Brooklyn who refuses to be pinned down, labelled, or made to commit to any single sexual partner. She shares her bed freely and openly with a number of suitors, chief among them the older, ever-serious Jamie (Tommy Redmond Hicks), the fast-talking joker Mars (Spike Lee himself), and the vain, preening, but beautiful Greer (John Canada Terrell).

Each man is initially painted as decidedly flawed, rather hopeless, and yet each, in their own way, offers Nola something valuable and wonderful. Jamie is devoted, dedicated, passionate. Mars is silly and playful and childlike. And Greer is successful, sharp, going places, and happy to take Nola with him.

Nola has different aspects of her personality touched and enlivened by each of them, and she will not choose any over the other. She is always upfront about this. She is a free-spirit, she is enjoying the fullness of life, and any man, or woman, who can’t deal with this is free to go their own way, in peace. And of course this unattainability makes her even more special in the eyes of her partners, and they each want to be the one to capture her, to lasso her spirit and prove to her, to themselves, to the universe, that they are worthy.

But Nola will not be captured, the more people want to pin her down, the more she goes to liquid and slips through their fingers. A Holly Golightly for the Fort Greene neighbourhood. And as her suitors’ impotence grows they lash out, shout at her that she must have something broken inside her to not be able to settle or to choose, for wanting it all, when life, and love, do not work that way. And they’re not wrong, but it’s not their call.

The film’s treatment of sex and relationships and love is mature, refreshing, and liberating. The honesty gives the piece a liveliness, a lot of its humour (it is very funny), and a real vein of sadness.

It is such ebullient filmmaking from Lee as well, shot in lovely black and white under a zesty jazz soundtrack, obviously reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Manhattan - it shares with that seven-year-older film an exuberance and intimacy of space, and an ability to collapse the romantic, the staged and the realistic into one encompassing moment. And, again like Allen, Lee embraces the artifice of film, with characters addressing the camera directly, inserts of still photographs, musical numbers, and sometimes characters interrupting or sharing fourth-wall-breaking monologues. It’s all fair game. The camera is the storyteller’s pen, and may go anywhere within the story - through time, space, into characters’ heads - to say whatever the storyteller’s impulse tells them should be said.

She’s Gotta Have It was a sensation upon release, low-budget and DIY and original, yet clearly earning its place within the milieu of 20th century cinema. It kickstarted the American indie movement of the 80s, inspiring countless filmmakers to tell their own personal stories, and showed the white establishment that black cinema could be urbane, complex, witty, and emotionally available, while still being hip and authentic as hell.

As Lee states in the credits, his film contains “no jheri curls! And no drugs!” Instead it has a thoughtful exploration of the fears and joys of sex - the lusts, the passions, the resentments, and the emotional core of humanity towards which even the most carnal of desires point. 

It is superb, a wonderful debut for a truly vital filmmaker. An updated television adaptation, by Lee himself, is currently streaming on Netflix; but do yourself a favour and check the original out first. It's fabulous.

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