Mamalicious!

I hope this makes it to my local arthouse theater.

From Salon.com:

“Part near-miss love story, part social commentary and part contemplative road trip through the streets of San Francisco, Barry Jenkins’ debut feature, “Medicine for Melancholy,” is so subtle and subdued that it nearly undercuts itself. I’d describe it, in fact, as a film that doesn’t quite work — but the way it doesn’t work is so distinctive and so interesting that it marks Jenkins as an exciting new face on the American indie scene.

“Medicine for Melancholy” has caused a mini-sensation on the festival scene since premiering last March at South by Southwest (and was nominated for multiple Spirit and Gotham awards), and that partly has to do with the film’s hushed tone and patient, intimate technique. In the mysterious opening scene, a man and woman wake up together without saying a word. They’re evidently awkward in each other’s company, but we have no idea what their relationship is or what has happened between them. For the first minute or so, you think Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton shot the film in black-and-white, until you notice the faintest washes of rusty red, dusty blue and pale pink — more like the memory of colors than colors themselves. The film’s reception also reflects the remarkable performances of Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Heggins as Micah and Jo, two strangers who begin to reveal themselves to each other, uncertainly and guardedly, on the day after their drunken one-night stand at somebody’s party. (If you watch the trailer, you may notice that Jo first introduces herself as “Rachel.” It’s that kind of hookup, at least at first.)

But “Medicine for Melancholy” is also newsworthy because of its faces, quite literally. Cenac and Heggins are African-American, as is Jenkins. This is firstly a personal and secondarily a political film; it isn’t trying to be anthropology. But it does focus on two black characters in America’s least black major city, characters who hunger for some kind of racial or cultural connection at the same time as they have embraced a largely white social milieu. For want of a better word, Jo and Micah are hipsters. (To use the marketing argot of the moment, I guess they’re “blipsters.”) They know about foreign films, marginal rock music and local art installations. Their friends and their lovers, at least in this phase of their lives, have mostly been white.

Read the rest here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Black to the Future, Popcorn and Raisinets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.