Old Yorker

  • Miss Juneteenth

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Channing Godfrey Peoples (2020)

    Channing Godfrey Peoples has achieved quite a feat in uniting critics on both sides of the Atlantic and from far apart on the political spectrum in praise of her first feature.  Mark Kermode, for example, sees in Miss Juneteenth a pervasive ‘sense of delayed or deferred emancipation … as [the African-American protagonist] Turquoise continues to fight battles against inequality (gender, race, wealth, opportunity) as a working single woman’.  The sui generis Armond White welcomes a film that ‘feels like the era’s first black conservative movie’.

    Juneteenth in America celebrates the emancipation of slaves – specifically, the proclamation of freedom from slavery in Texas, on 19 June 1865.  Although the annual holiday on that date is now celebrated nationwide, Peoples’s film is set in Fort Worth (the writer-director’s home city) and focuses on its Miss Juneteenth pageant, a beauty-slash-talent contest for local schoolgirls of colour, whose winner is awarded a scholarship to a ‘historically black university’ of her choice.  Turquoise Jones (Nicole Beharie) won the prize in 2004 but soon dropped out of college.  Fifteen years later, she’s juggling two part-time jobs, at a local bar and as a mortuary beautician, and struggling to make ends meet.  She’s also desperate to see her daughter Kai (Alexis Chikaeze) win the 2019 renewal of Miss Juneteenth.  The imminent approach of Kai’s fifteenth birthday makes clear what derailed Turquoise’s educational progress and career prospects[1].

    Turquoise is separated from Kai’s father, Ronnie (Kendrick Sampson).  They still sometimes sleep together, though she always asks him not to park his van outside her house.  Ronnie is a car mechanic but his gambling makes him an unreliable source of financial support.  His counterpoint in the story is the upstanding, dapper mortician Bacon (Akron Watson), whose feelings for Turquoise, though she likes him, are not reciprocated.  Other significant characters include the bar owner Wayman (Marcus C Mauldin); Betty Ray (Liz Mikel), Turquoise’s work colleague in Wayman’s bar, whose hair dyes are as colourful as her turn of phrase; and Turquoise’s mother (Lori Hayes), ardently religious and seriously alcoholic.  But the chief focus of Miss Juneteenth is the mother-daughter relationship of Turquoise and Kai.  They get on well but Kai enters the pageant reluctantly.  She’d rather be developing her interest in dance, in the company of Quintavious (Jaime Matthis), a rapping schoolfellow of whom Turquoise disapproves.

    It’s getting ever harder to make out the dialogue in English-language films on Curzon Home Cinema, which doesn’t subtitle them:  the last three I’ve watched – Hope Gap, Monsoon, now Miss Juneteenth – have disparate settings but were uniformly challenging to listen to, even with the volume turned up stupidly high.  (The voices are oddly out of balance with other soundtrack elements.)  But the plot and thrust of Channing Godfrey Peoples’s film are easy to follow.  She takes a familiar scenario – a parent disappointed by their life tries to redeem it through the child for whom they’re obsessively ambitious – and revitalises it by means of a highly specific cultural context.   Peoples realises the social setting well.  In a cinema year that has also included Misbehaviour, the association of emancipation and ethnic consciousness-raising with a semi-beauty contest for girls isn’t without irony.  Peoples seems well aware of this, not least in the nicely ambiguous presentation of Mrs Washington (Phyllis Cicero), the doyenne of Fort Worth’s Miss Juneteenth pageant and still its organiser.  She’s preciously pompous as she urges the competitors to be both proud of who they are and ladylike.

    Nicole Beharie is well cast in the lead.  ‘I will never get over seeing Miss Juneteenth cleaning toilets,’ says Betty Ray as she watches Turquoise doing just that at the bar:  Beharie’s elegant beauty gives an extra edge to the heroine’s unlovely work, as well as making it easily believable that she won the contest back in the day.  (A brief flashback to her teenage triumph is surplus to requirements.)  Beharie gives a fine performance and the film is strongly acted throughout – Kendrick Sampson has relaxed presence and makes Ronnie especially convincing.  The main problem with Miss Juneteenth is that Peoples’s screenplay is too tightly crafted:  the downside of that comes through chiefly in the underwritten character of Kai.

    Turquoise doesn’t just want her daughter to emulate her Miss Juneteenth victory before going on to the better things she missed out on; she even wants Kai, for her ‘party piece’ that’s an important part of the competition, to recite the same poem as she did:  Maya Angelou’s ‘Phenomenal Woman’.  In the event, Kai meets her mother halfway:  she delivers Angelou’s words in conjunction with a dance routine; Quintavious, in the wings, supplies the backing track.  When Ronnie fails to come up with the cash for Kai’s dress for the contest, she ends up wearing instead the one that Turquoise wore – ‘a winning dress’, as her mother reminds her.  These two were never anything like the same dress size but the re-use of the costume, which isn’t (to my inexpert eyes) conspicuously outdated beside those of Kai’s rivals, underlines the time-warped aspect of the contest, as well as Kai’s compromised identity in it.

    Peoples just about gets away with these pieces of over-neat plotting but not with a larger issue.  The fact that Turquoise had to abandon her dreams when she gave birth must affect Kai’s feelings about the contest far more than Alexis Chikaeze, good as she is, is allowed to say or suggest.  Kai is too intelligent not to be acutely aware that she’s the reason for her mother’s frustrated ambitions but we don’t get any sense of this informing Kai’s attitude towards the pageant.  (Nor does the film convey any idea of her interactions with other girls in the competition or at school.)  Kai simply wants to approach Miss Juneteenth with a degree of independence her mother denies her:  Peoples uses her and Turquoise to represent a generational difference in African-American self-image that likely applies to other competitors, too – ones who didn’t turn their mother’s life upside down by being born.

    As she prepares to go on stage, Kai looks at her reflection in the dressing-room mirror.  Turquoise has made her straighten her hair for the pageant; Kai takes eleventh-hour action to restore the Afro look she sees as essential to her identity.  In the audience, Turquoise is shocked by Kai’s appearance and her poem-and-dance number.  When the result is announced – Kai doesn’t finish in the top three, let alone win – the bottom falls out of Turquoise’s world.  The film now quickly takes conclusive steps that are narratively efficient, feelgood and phony.  Turquoise’s disappointment vanishes almost immediately:  as Kai tearfully apologises, her mother, who has instantly realised the falseness of her dream and dispelled it, comforts her.  In the final scene, Wayman, who has recovered from a heart attack but decided to retire, agrees to sell his bar to Turquoise, who will buy him out in instalments!  (As Wikipedia says, she ‘begins her new life as a businesswoman’.)  Miss Juneteenth is skilful, likeable and entertaining.  It would be a stronger film if Channing Godfrey Peoples had gone further and deeper in exploring the central relationship – and presented it from the daughter’s as much as the mother’s point of view.

    1 October 2020

    [1] As one of IMDb’s eagle-eyed goof-spotters has pointed out, this doesn’t (quite) add up – it ‘would mean Turquoise gave birth just before the pageant she won’.

  • Monsoon

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Hong Khaou (2019)

    Another Vietnam-revisited drama though it could hardly be more different from Da 5 Bloods.  Kit (Henry Golding) was born in Saigon but left when he was six years old:  he, his elder brother and their parents were among thousands of ‘boat people’ refugees.  The family settled in England, the choice of Kit’s mother because she liked the look of the Queen.  Writer-director Hong Khaou’s second feature, following his admirable Lilting (2014), is inspired by his own experiences.  He was born in Cambodia in 1975, to Chinese-Cambodian parents.  He was only a few months old when his family fled to Vietnam to escape the Khmer Rouge.  Eight years later, they came to the UK as political refugees.  In Monsoon Kit’s mother has recently died and he’s returning with her ashes to Saigon – Ho Chi Minh City as it now officially is – several decades after leaving the place.  His brother will join him soon, bringing with him the remains of their longer-deceased father, and they’ll scatter their parents’ ashes.  ‘It took so much for them to leave,’ says Kit’s childhood friend Lee (David Tran), ‘and now you bring them back’.

    Monsoon is visually more ambitious and arresting than Lilting.  Khaou and his cinematographer Benjamin Kracun do more than construct a convincing picture of Ho Chi Minh City as a self-confident modern metropolis.  Kit returns to Vietnam in search of his past:  the film’s imagery suggests the complications and frustrations of such an undertaking.  The opening sequence is an extended overhead shot of central Saigon, early in the day.  The initially deserted roads gradually fill up with cars and, especially, motor cycles:  the criss-crossing of these, from different camera angles, is a motif throughout.  (The swarming, whining motor bikes look, from a distance, and sound like peculiar insects.)  Shots of buildings, either from Kit’s point of view or showing him as a tiny figure at a window among many other windows, stress his isolation in a big, strange place, though its neon lights at night make it alluring, too.  In the course of the film, Kit makes two or three visits to people he knows or gets to know.  The front doors opening to him, small gaps in rows of closed doors, signify his rare opportunities for connection.

    Khaou suggests the passage of days mainly by his protagonist’s wearing different-coloured T-shirts as he goes about the city’s tourist spots.  When he calls on Lee, who’s also his distant cousin, and his elderly mother, Kit bears gifts – whisky, chocolate, a water filter, shortbread with a picture of the Queen on the tin.  (This is mentioned before the revelation of why Kit’s mother preferred the prospect of England, despite the weather, to America, France or Australia.)   The conversation touches on the circumstances of Kit’s family’s escape from Vietnam and the money lent by his mother to enable Lee’s family to open an electronics shop, which Lee still runs.  We also learn that Kit’s brother is married, with two young sons.  Khaou doesn’t give so much information about the life Kit has left in England, except that he works as an IT animator, but it’s clear enough he didn’t share it with anyone close.  He uses a dating app to meet Lewis (Parker Sawyers), an African-American ex-pat, who has a clothing design business in Saigon.  After drinks, they go back to Kit’s rented apartment; Kit expects this to be a one night stand until he meets Lewis again at a touring art show in the city.  Its lively, articulate organiser, Linh (Molly Harris), sounds American but is actually Vietnamese.  By the time Kit takes a short trip to Hanoi, his parents’ birthplace, the relationship with Lewis has become more serious, though Kit uses the dating app to have sex with another man on his arrival in Hanoi.  He also renews his acquaintance with Linh, whose art show has moved on to her home city, and visits her family.

    As a dramatic piece, Khaou’s new film is also more ambitious than Lilting but less persuasive.  This has something to do with the main character or, at least, the lead actor.  There’s one sequence of heavy rainfall in Monsoon but, as Khaou tells Devika Girish in a Sight & Sound (October 2020) interview, ‘The title’s a kind of red herring … I was very aware that [the film] isn’t going to be set during the monsoon.  It was more a metaphor about the feelings that arise when you go back to your homeland’.  Yet Kit, on his return to Vietnam, is far from inundated with recollections of his years there; as Khaou says later in the S&S interview, ‘There is a very romantic idea that we need to go back to our past and investigate it in order to go forward.  But for a lot of people who don’t have memories of [their past], it is really hard’.  My own memories of early childhood are so fragmentary that Kit’s struggle to remember his years in Vietnam is very credible but this dictates that the actor playing him needs to express and involve us without the assistance of flashbacks to which he can react.

    Only three years ago, Henry Golding was best known on screen as a presenter of the BBC’s Travel Show (there’s an amusing irony to see him playing a visitor to the strange land of the past); then came his starring role in the international hit romcom Crazy Rich Asians (2018).  In his S&S interview, Hong Khaou says that Golding ‘doesn’t come from an acting background, so whenever he hit emotional moments, they were very honest, they weren’t mannered’.  Golding is better in Monsoon than in Crazy Rich Asians but his lack of acting experience isn’t altogether a plus.  He conveys Kit’s prevailing moods without animating his unspoken feelings (something Ben Whishaw did so well as the lead of Lilting).  Golding’s low-key playing, which Khaou may well have encouraged, includes speaking too quietly, sometimes tonelessly.

    Khaou’s increased dramatic ambition comes in the use of supporting characters to represent themes or groups:  Lewis, the American legacy of guilt and trauma from the Vietnam War; Lee, Kit’s contemporaries who didn’t get out of the country; Linh, a younger generation of highly-educated, culturally outward-looking Vietnamese.  This representative role brings with it a fair amount of explanatory dialogue, most effectively managed in the case of Linh.  Using a foreign language to keep a secret was an important element of Lilting and one of Monsoon‘s highlights is the scene in which Kit goes to Linh’s family home and the two of them talk in English, alongside her uncomprehending older relatives, around a stunning abundance of lotus blossoms:  her parents run a business producing and selling lotus tea.  Linh has stayed in Vietnam because of her education.  She’s exasperated by what she sees as the obsolescence of lotus tea (‘only old people drink it’) and the ancient superstitions around its production but her parents have spent so much on her Westernising schooling that Linh feels she can’t leave them to live abroad.

    Lewis ‘started out as Hank, a Caucasian American [but Khaou says] “… it was felt that the … character’s voice – the dominant white American, in terms of the subtext of the war – had been heard before …”’ (Wikipedia).  Monsoon screened at film festivals during 2019 but its commercial release comes several months after that of Da 5 Bloods:  African-American post-Vietnam voices have been heard very recently.  Even without Spike Lee’s film getting in the way, Lewis would be too earnestly laden a conception to be convincing as a character.  He works well, though, as someone who can make Kit happy.  The gradual growth of their feelings for each other, which Khaou shows clearly but never too emphatically, makes the closing stages of Monsoon satisfying.   By now, Kit seems virtually to have abandoned his voyage of retrospective (self-)discovery in favour of the here and now.  His reaction to childhood photos that Lee’s mother has unearthed, at Kit’s request, is remarkably indifferent:  he says he’ll look at them later.  We see him greet his brother and family at the airport but that’s the last we see of them, and there’s no scattering of ashes.  In the film’s finale, Kit and Lewis, in a bar together, climb stairs to the roof of the building and look out from it at the Saigon cityscape.  For Kit, in the company of Lewis, the place no longer feels so strange.

    28 September 2020

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