Old Yorker

  • Queen of Glory

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Nana Mensah (2021)

    As well as writing and directing, Nana Mensah stars in Queen of Glory – as Sarah Obeng, a doctoral student in molecular neuro-oncology at Columbia University.  Sarah is planning to move from New York to Ohio, where Lyle Cummings, a senior colleague and her boyfriend, has been offered a post.  Sarah’s scholastic profile doesn’t cut much ice with her family, who are part of the Bronx’s Ghanaian-African community and seem to see her research and part-time teaching as a kind of curious hobby.  Mensah’s Sarah looks and sounds fed up from the start – even before her mother suddenly dies, her estranged father returns from Ghana, and she learns that she’s inherited her mother’s house and business – a Christian bookstore in the Bronx.  For Sarah, all three things are bad news.  She tries to get the funeral over with the minimum delay and ceremony, arranging for her mother’s cremation before a wake for friends and relations takes place.  She puts the ‘King of Glory’ bookshop on the market; the estate agents report interest in turning the premises into a fusion bistro.  In the event – of course – Sarah is thwarted on both counts and in her Ohio plans.  She’s forced in the process to re-evaluate her relationships, with her rascally father Godwin (Oberon K A Adjepong); with the perfidious Lyle (Adam Leon); with the alarmingly tattooed ex-con Pitt (Meeko Gattuso), who works in the bookshop; and, especially, with her cultural roots.

    I happened to see Queen of Glory just a few days after Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street.  The coincidence – and opportunity for comparison – made Mensah’s dramedy more interesting to watch than I think it would otherwise have been.  There’s nearly half a century between these two explorations of tensions, within a specific immigrant group that’s settled in New York, between ‘old country’ tradition and ambition to get on in America.  (According to an online piece in the Smithsonian magazine, ‘Ghanaians have come in several waves to the United States, many arriving during the 1980s and ’90s when the country [Ghana!] was ruled by a military regime…’)  Hester Street was shot in black and white.  Although Mensah’s movie is in colour, she punctuates the narrative with what appears to be archive footage of social and other rituals in Ghana, some of which is monochrome film.  This is an economical and reasonably effective means of keeping Sarah’s ethnic inheritance always in the viewer’s mind but Queen of Glory doesn’t do much to dramatise the conflicting allegiances that tug at her.

    In the early stages, Sarah’s frustration is presumably with her family’s expectation that she’ll be at their beck and call, and their failure to treat the career that its brightest member is developing with the respect Sarah thinks it deserves.  In truth, though, you get to feel the heroine’s grumpy and at odds with her kin simply because her outlook and values must, according to formula, be reviewed and changed in the course of the film.  There are some funny details – Sarah’s diverse fast-food comfort-eating, Godwin’s fervent support of Arsenal, whose matches he determinedly watches on his daughter’s TV.  There are some sharp lines:  at the wake, one of her mother’s Russian immigrant neighbours, the only white people in evidence, says awkwardly, ‘This looks like a family gathering’; Sarah replies, ‘No, everyone’s just Black’.  Her relatives insist on another ceremony, involving full Ghanaian funeral rites.  Sarah, with effort, adapts her hair and clothes for the occasion.  It’s affecting when, during the dancing at the funeral, Sarah suddenly breaks down in grief for the mother she often resented but has lost.  Mensah skews Sarah’s cultural dilemma, however, by putting her in a relationship with a white man who – from his first appearance – is obviously unworthy of her.  Lyle is a married man with two children, a controlling ratbag who can’t pronounce Accra correctly and isn’t even good-looking.  His whiteness embodies Sarah’s misconceived attempts to make it in America, and makes the writer-director’s life easier.  Queen of Glory would be a tougher, richer film if Sarah were in love with an African-American academic.

    In her Sight and Sound (September 2022) review, Clara Bradbury-Rance calls Mensah’s film ‘the latest in a wave of contemporary feminist comedy dramas helmed by writer-director-creators such as Michaela Coel and Issa Rae’.  I don’t know Rae’s work but Bradbury-Rance’s invocation of Coel serves only to emphasise the gulf in ambition and achievement between I May Destroy You (2020) and the slight (and short – only 79 minutes) Queen of Glory.  Coel’s TV serial was genuinely provocative, its protagonist complexly and challengingly feminist.  By placing the two pieces in the same category, Bradbury-Rance merely implies that, for a screen work to be ‘feminist’, it’s now enough for its author and her main character to be female.  This film struck me as rather less feminist than Hester Street, despite Joan Micklin Silver’s unassertive approach.  When Sarah’s unreconstructed father slaps her face, she slaps him back but the moment stands out only because it’s untypical of the heroine.  When Godwin first arrives at her place, his daughter can’t get upstairs without repeatedly stopping to answer his peremptory questions on how to work the TV remote control.  Sarah eventually seems to come to the view that she’s somehow misjudged her father.

    An alert, quietly charismatic presence on the screen, Nana Mensah does enough in her debut feature to make you eager to find out where she’ll go next in cinema.  Herself the child of Ghanaian immigrants to the US in the 1970s, she clearly knows plenty of the cultural landscape she describes in Queen of Glory.  Yet there’s a whiff of condescension in her presentation of Sarah Obeng as uncomfortable and unsure about her identity, compared with the mostly ‘simple’ people around her.  At the end of the film, Sarah, wearing a kerchief of African fabric, stands beside Pitt, approving the repainted signage of what will now be a bookshop and bakery (Pitt makes cakes).  I assumed this meant she was going to run the place and had renounced a career in academic science, thanks to her bruising romantic rejection by virtually its sole representative in the story.  This amounts to a dispiriting conclusion that’s hardly muffled by the dynamic African music that Nana Mensah puts on the closing soundtrack.

    31 August 2022

  • Hester Street

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joan Micklin Silver (1975)

    In the pre-Sundance era of American independent film-making, writer-director Joan Micklin Silver’s debut feature enjoyed unusual success.  Hester Street got some good reviews, fared well at the box office (Wikipedia shows takings of $5m from a $370,000 budget) and earned its lead actress Carol Kane a surprise Oscar nomination.  Micklin Silver’s screenplay is adapted from Abraham Cahan’s Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, first published in 1896.  Yekl is a novella and Hester Street, which runs ninety minutes, a small-scale drama with barely a subplot in sight.  But the theme is important (though never self-important) and the characters are engaging.

    The setting is the Jewish immigrant quarter on New York’s Lower East Side, in the last decade of the nineteenth century.  The people are Ashkenazi Jews, mostly of Russian origin; the drama derives from the tensions between their preserving traditions of the old country and assimilating into the culture of the new.  Yankel (Steven Keats) has acculturated quickly in America.  He now goes by the name of Jake; he’s having an affair with Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh), a Polish immigrant who works at a dance ‘academy’ and aspires to set up her own.  Jake borrows money from Mamie, though he’s the best paid worker in a tailoring business, where he spends his days hunched over a sewing machine.  He works in the sweatshop opposite Bernstein (Mel Howard), Yeshiva-educated and in mourning for a life from which emigration has exiled him.  Bernstein boards with Jake because he can’t afford anything better.  Jake has a wife and a young son back in Russia; when his own father dies, they cross the Atlantic to join Jake in Manhattan.  The wife, Gitl (Carol Kane), is frustrating to her husband because she’s ill-prepared and ill-disposed to Americanise.  She has no English.  As a married Jewess, she insists on wearing a wig or a kerchief to cover her own hair.  Jake wants their son Yossele (Paul Freedman) to be known as Joey from now on but Gitl digs her heels in.  Distressed by but resistant to her blowhard husband’s bullying, she’s increasingly drawn to the sad-eyed, courteous Bernstein.

    Joan Micklin Silver seems to make her cultural sympathies instantly clear.  Hester Street’s opening sequence is set in Mamie’s workplace, owned by Feltner (Stephen Strimpell):  couples move around the cramped dance floor and change partners (predicting the film’s conclusion).  After the dance class, Jake, Mamie, Feltner and others drink and chat in a bar, where they’re joined by, and make light-hearted fun of, a younger Jewish immigrant (Zane Lasky), just off the boat and still wearing a traditional beard and hat.  Later, when Gitl and Bernstein have begun to talk together while Jake is out drinking or womanising, they declare, in Yiddish, ‘a pox on Columbus’.   Although this too is light-hearted, they mean what they say.  Away from his New Home sewing machine (a real make put to symbolic use), Bernstein continues to study his holy books.  He does so out of a sense of duty but the books are also a linus blanket.

    Micklin Silver turns out to be far from thoroughly traditional, though.  Gitl’s gradual emergence from an oppressive marriage is at the heart of Hester Street and, in the climax to the story, she and Jake divorce.  The officiating rabbi (Zvee Scooler) reminds the ex-couple of the dictates of Jewish law:  a divorced husband is free to marry again immediately while his former wife must wait at least ninety-one days to do so.  Micklin Silver uses the rabbi’s words not just to make a feminist point but to foreshadow her neat, just-desserts conclusion.   As Jake and Mamie rush off to wed, Jake learns that his new bride, thanks to the divorce settlement, is less well off than he thought – a strong hint that he’ll repent at leisure.  In contrast, Gitl walks down the street unhurriedly with Bernstein and the son she now calls Joey.  She also speaks English and shows her own hair; her husband-to-be is no longer submerged in regret for what he lost in coming to America.  With the money Gitl obtained in exchange for the divorce, she and Bernstein plan to open a grocery store.  They discuss whether to stock sodas and seltzers.  The last line of the script – Bernstein’s – is ‘we mustn’t be too quick to say this or that’.

    Everything about Carol Kane’s gently blossoming Gitl and Mel Howard’s droll, melancholy Bernstein is eloquently natural.  Paul Freedman’s Yossele-Joey, who resembles his pale, fair-haired mother so much more than his swarthy, rakish father, is also very right, though the boy’s part is underwritten.  He gets on well with kind, earnest Bernstein but also with the more exuberant Jake – it’s not clear what effect the rift between his parents has on the child.  There’s some coarse, stagy acting in smaller parts – how coarse seems to depend on how small the part.  Robert Lesser is excruciatingly crude in his one scene as Mamie’s lawyer, ineptly negotiating a divorce deal with Gitl.  Doris Roberts has the screen time to turn Mrs Kavarsky, who seems at first a cartoon nosy neighbour and gossip, into a more rounded character.  The main weakness of Hester Street is Steven Keats’s Jake.   Instead of showing, as he needs to do, the strain of Jake’s determination to be American, Keats struggles to convince that he was ever anything else (and particularly with sustaining the accent meant to show his European origins).  His screen presence is strong enough but contains not a trace of the old country:  it’s impossible to believe Jake was once like the bearded, prayerful greenhorn immigrant in the bar at the start of the film.

    Joan Micklin Silver chose to shoot in black and white (the cinematographer is Kenneth Van Sickle).  This makes sense:  her audience is familiar with the world that Hester Street brings to life primarily through monochrome photographs of the period.  Micklin Silver ends, however, with a freeze frame that doesn’t suggest a still.  This shot of Gitl and Bernstein in a busy Manhattan street conveys, rather, suddenly arrested motion – that these people were moving on the screen a split-second before.  William Bolcom arranged the music, by Herbert L Clarke  (who was famous chiefly as a cornet player:  Gerard Schwarz plays the score’s cornet solo).  This soundtrack is always agreeable and occasionally very effective – for example, as accompaniment to Jake and Joey’s pretend baseball game on a picnic outing.  At other times the music tends to overstress that Hester Street is minor but that’s never enough to detract from the film’s great interest and real charm.

    25 August 2022

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