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Modern Classics: Pariah
 One of cinema’s greatest joys is discovery. Ten years ago, my department was dismissed early for an upcoming holiday and I wandered over to the Landmark E Street movie theater in downtown Washington D.C. I knew little about Pariah, but it looked interesting and was starting soon. The film centered on a 17-year old African-American woman, Alike (Oduye), coming to grips with her sexuality, her identity, and her artistry. The raw emotion, powerful performances, beauty and authenticity struck a chord. The authenticity lent itself to universality. On the surface, my seventeen year old self – a white heterosexual Jew in a private high school, was worlds apart from Alike. Yet I could identify with Alike’s uncertainty, with her constantly feeling out of place. Like her I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. I quickly understood that Dee Rees, the film’s writer-director, was an emerging talent and I followed her career ever since. In June 2021, for the film’s 10th anniversary, Criterion added Pariah to its collection. The Criterion Collection of DVDs and Blu-Rays features works from master directors across the world. Criterion works with film restorers, film technicians, and if possible, the directors themselves to produce the highest quality pictures and sound. Rees became the first African-American female director to have her work included in this collection. While one could argue that Criterion should have been more inclusive before, it’s still a notable achievement. So this seemed like a fitting time to revisit Pariah, and understand more about why I loved the film. Rees originally made a short version of Pariah in 2007 as her thesis at New York University. She was coming out as a lesbian, and said her parents initially did not approve. Rees took the heart of her personal journey and adapted it for a high-schooler. While the circumstance of what Alike experiences may have differed from Rees, the emotions and feelings ring true in every frame of the film. Rees spent the years between the short film and the feature further developing the story, including workshopping at the Sundance Institute. The extra effort shows in her richly complex and layered characters. Not only that, but the story flows from them instead of just happening to them. The visual style developed by Rees and cinematographer Bradford Young deepens this character centered approach. On the Criterion Blu-Ray, Rees explained that she had Young “shoot faces like landscapes.” Rees and Young rely heavily on close-ups, telling the story through their actors’ facial expressions even more than the dialogue. They also use hand held camerawork, which, combined with the close-ups, creates an intimacy essential to the story. Pariah makes you identify with all the main characters, not just Alike but also her friends and family. Alike’s best friend Laura (Walker) has her own arc so finely drawn that I felt that Rees could have made a spin-off movie focusing on her. A lesser film would have made Alike’s mother Audrey (Wayans) a textbook villain, as she’s the one who never accepts her daughter. Thankfully, Rees doesn’t take the easy path, and instead illustrates how Audrey’s actions, misguided as they are, come from a place of love and desperation. In the end though, Pariah remains Alike’s journey. In her scenes the camera generally stays closest to her. Rees and her team did extensive research on the queer/lesbian African-American subculture, in particular the lesbian nightclubs in Brooklyn. Not only does this add to the authenticity, it also adds to Alike’s emotional truth. She doesn’t feel at home there much more than she does in school or with her family. Rees shows Alike changing her clothes frequently depending on what environment she’s in. The clothes serve as a kind of revolving uniform for her. Besides the clothes, Rees and her team use production design, music, lighting and even food to flesh out Alike and her world. On the Blu-Ray, Rees explains that her production designer dressed Laura’s room and Alike’s girlfriend Bina’s (Davis) room to reflect their characters, but dressed Alike’s room to reflect her parents, another way of showing how out of place Alike feels even in her own house. Rees also gave Alike, Laura and Bina their own type of music. Young lit the various environments with different colors and filters, helping provide each a distinct flavor. The food becomes a symbol of Audrey’s failed attempts to connect with her husband. While Rees and her team only had a $400,000 budget every cent of that appears on screen. Of course all of Rees’s efforts would have proved fruitless without her terrific cast. Oduye says so much through just her face and seems like a natural teenager, even though she was in her early 30s when filming. Alike expresses herself in her poetry, and Oduye conveys the soul of an artist. She and Walker have natural chemistry and are completely believable as close friends. The same holds true for Oduye and Sahra Mellesse, who plays Alike’s younger sister Sharonda. We accept that they bicker as sisters do but would have each other’s back when it counts. As Bina, Davis lights the spark that leads to Alike’s attraction. She gives Bina a worldly air that helps the contrast with Alike’s sheltered life. Wayans was best known for her hilarious work on the landmark sketch comedy show “In Living Color,” but is a revelation here. She portrays Audrey’s intolerance, pain and anger in an understanding all-too-human way. Charles Parnell plays Arthur, Alike’s father as a flawed, complicated man torn between his love for his daughters and his frustration with his marriage. While the 18 day shooting schedule didn’t leave much time for rehearsals, Rees helped her cast refine their characters through “homework” assignments. She had Oduye and Walker hang out at Dave and Busters as Alike and Laura. On the more daring side, Rees also had Oduye, Mellesse, Wayans and Parnell go to a real family therapist, who did not know they were actors, to work out their “issues.” Once again, the extra effort shows. Rees also uses Alike’s emerging writing talents as another crucial way the character molds her own identity. The film begins with a line from the late African-American poet Audre Lorde: “Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs,” which perfectly captures Alike when we first see her. From then on, Rees uses the poetry judiciously, with the evolving tone of the poems becoming a window into Alike’s changes. By the time Rees closes with Alike declaring “I am not running, I am choosing. Running is not a choice from the breaking. Breaking is freeing, broken is freedom. I am not broken, I am free” we get how much Alike has grown in the short time we have spent with her. To her credit, Rees does not sugarcoat the consequences of Alike or Laura’s living their true selves. Towards the end of the film Laura and Alike each confront their disapproving mothers. Rees uses few words in those scenes, and she was able to do that because the audience knows who these people are, and because we are able to read so much into the actors’ faces. Those moments are simple and devastating, not just for these young women now, but also for their future. It may take years for a reconciliation with their mothers, or it may never happen at all. While perhaps it would have been easier to tie up all of the story threads in a crowd pleasing bow that would also have been inauthentic and would have cheapened everything that had come before. Rees respects her characters, the audience, and all the real-life Alikes and Lauras too much to take shortcuts. Rees has never played up how pioneering Pariah was, but that does not lessen how groundbreaking the film became. It was one of the first, after the 1996 film The Watermelon Woman, to tell stories of LGBTQ African-Americans. Rees was one of the first gay African-Americans to break into mainstream cinema. Even today, opportunities for these filmmakers are few and far between. But there are more of them now than when Pariah hit theaters. Kara Keeling, Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, said that Pariah helped pave the way for Moonlight winning the Best Picture Oscar a few years later. On the Criterion Blu-Ray, Rees claims that Pariah is not a coming out story or a coming of age story, but rather a story of an artist finding her place. I respectfully disagree. Pariah is all three of those stories told in a lean 86 minutes. I’m glad I took a chance on the film 10 years ago, and I hope with this anniversary and the Criterion news that others will take a chance on Pariah too. Adam Spector October 1, 2021 Contact us: |
