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’.
