Movie review: For Colored Girls ***

For Colored Girls ***

Stars: Whoopi Goldberg, Janet Jackson, Loretta Devine
Director: Tyler Perry
Rated: R
Showing: Southside Cinema week of Friday, November 26 - Daily at 7:30pm. For information about film times, call 297-2821.
Runtime: 120 minutes
Drama

A who’s who of black actresses star in the latest offering from prolific filmmaker Tyler Perry, a hard-hitting drama based on the award-winning play by Ntozake Shange.

The play, a milestone for African Americans and feminists, is a series of 20 poems recited by nameless characters known only by their signature colour.

The monologues focus on difficult issues such as abuse and abortion and offer a commentary about what it means to be a woman of colour.

It is not an obvious project to bring to the big screen and certainly not an easy one.

Marks against it would probably be the poetic language, the lack of linear narrative and, sadly, studio bosses’ concerns about the bankability of a cast made up entirely of women of colour.

If anyone could make it work, it would be Perry, a constant success at the box office.

His films also always revolve around female characters who suffer at the hands of useless men.

Perry took 14 of the poems and devised a narrative from them, taking great liberties with the text.

His nine stars deal with everything from adultery and abuse to date rape and mental illness.

The movie celebrates female empowerment and sisterhood but this far from not easy viewing — the characters constantly suffer before they find solace in one another.

Misery abounds — there is little levity and every character is emotionally damaged. There is only one positive male character – the rest are cheats, liars and abusers.

As always with Perry, the script is overly melodramatic with clichéd characterisations and amateur psychoanalysis.

The cast is exceptional, notably Kimberley Elise (Diary Of A Mad Black Woman) as central character Crystal, the victim of horrific domestic violence.

She works for Joanna (Janet Jackson), a bullying magazine editor who discovers her husband is having affairs with men, and lives next door to Gilda (Phylicia Rashad), who clashes with the sexually liberated Tangie (Thandie Newton).

Tangie’s devout mother Alice (Whoopi Goldberg) lives downstairs with her sister Nyla (Tessa Thompson).

As Crystal’s life becomes ever more traumatic, the women in her life rally round her and learn more about themselves in the process.