Spike Lee (1986)
She is Nola Darling – young, attractive and sexually independent. Spike Lee places Nola and a trio of male suitors within the framework of a pseudo-documentary about her. The characters speak to camera about their life and attitudes. The interviews are juxtaposed with scenes that show how they actually interact. Those scenes often reveal amusing chasms between the theory and practice of their lives. Other talking heads include Nola’s father and a woman psychotherapist. The BFI programme note for She’s Gotta Have It comprised excerpts from Tom Milne’s review in Monthly Film Bulletin and Paula J Massood’s 2003 book, Black City Cinema. Both excerpts compare Lee’s structure, and his intention in using it, to what Kurosawa did in Rashomon. It’s fair enough from a cinema history perspective but the comparison made me smile – just because the two movies are in other respects so different. She’s Gotta Have It is deftly kinetic. Spike Lee, who shot the film in just twelve days, displays a touch both light and sure. The cinematographer, Ernest Dickerson, lights the images so as to deepen subtly the candid sexual comedy. The film is in black and white, except for a vividly-coloured song and dance number midway through. The musical rhythm of the actors’ voices is complemented by a jazzy score by the writer-director’s father, Bill Lee.
This is technically Spike Lee’s second feature; the first, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983), was made while Lee was still in film school and submitted as part of his degree course. The setting of She’s Gotta Have It is Brooklyn, where Nola (Tracy Camila Johns) works as a graphic designer; as Pauline Kael noted, the ‘basic set is Nola’s bed’. The men with whom Nola shares it are Jamie (Tommy Redmond Hicks), Greer (John Canada Terrell) and Mars (Spike Lee). Nola’s refusal to be a one-man woman is the film’s comic and satirical motor: Lee has fun lampooning various male assumptions and expectations. (By the end of the film, all three affairs have ended.) Jamie is affluent, conventional and rather a drag but there’s a tension in some of the scenes between Tracy Camila Jones and Tommy Redmond Hicks that makes them distinctive. The more obviously ridiculous Greer is upwardly mobile – or so he hopes; for him, that means putting distance between his racial identity and his social status. Mars, who is unemployed and wears spectacles that seem wider than his body, has wit and lust enough to compensate for a lack of physical advantages and career prospects. (Spike Lee comes over like a young, jive-talking variation of the classic Woody Allen persona.) All the players are good though none of them, with the possible exception of Lee himself, is as loose and expressive in the main action as in their appearance as part of the closing credits – the cast introduce themselves in goofing curtain calls.
9 December 2015
