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
