Black Women in Hollywood

‘Bessie’: Unapologetically Black, Female, and Queer

‘Bessie’ is one of the rare mainstream films that shows an unapologetically Black, female and queer protagonist. That alone is groundbreaking in an otherwise straightforward biopic.

Written by Lisa Bolekaja.

See-line woman
Wiggle wiggle
Turn like a cat
Wink at a man
And he wink back

Now child
See-line woman
Empty his pockets
And wreck his days
Make him love her
And she’ll fly away

Writer/director Dee Rees opens the film Bessie with the Nina Simone classic “See-Line Woman” playing as the camera takes in Queen Latifah in close-up, her face drenched in resplendent blue lighting. The color, framing and music told me from jump that the narrative would be coming from a place of womanist Blackness. Nina Simone, the High Priestess of Soul, was signifying musically the proper introduction to Bessie Smith, the woman known in her day as the Empress of the Blues.

The story of Bessie Smith has been a long time coming, and it was quite timely that she should be given her due just a few days after the passing of the Blues legend B.B. King. Most people know very little about Bessie Smith, and it is almost a given that biopics are never truly satisfying, typically following a rise to fame and falling into trouble narrative. All I wanted to know was, would Rees be true to the highly unorthodox life of Smith? Or would we be subjected to a safe narrative that tip-toed around the raunchy, bisexual and profane realness of the Bessie Smith I read about in college?

Rees kept it real. Bessie is one of the rare mainstream films that shows an unapologetically Black, female and queer protagonist. That alone is groundbreaking in an otherwise straightforward biopic. Within ten minutes of the film, we see Bessie fooling around with a male paramour whom she beats up after he gets a little too fresh for her tastes, and then we see her in bed with her longtime female lover, Lucille (the gorgeous Tika Sumpter). It comes off natural, not some forbidden plot device to be used later to create conflict. It is what it is, and Bessie doesn’t waste time fretting over it. When she jumps on a train owned by Ma Rainey (Mo’Nique) to beg for a singing job and observes Ma interacting with her own female lover who prances around comfortably topless, Ma asks her straight out, “Watchu know about it?” Bessie tells her, “Same thing you do.” And that is that.

It was very powerful to see Black queer women openly affectionate with one another, and openly sexual in private spaces, especially for that time period. Black queer women, hardly ever get to see themselves on film without the narrative making them act secretive of fearful. Throughout the viewing, I kept waiting for Bessie’s bisexuality to become a big issue with her family, her band, or even her husband (and many lovers). It didn’t.

Ma Rainey takes Bessie under her wing, teaches her the ropes and how to sing the Blues to make the audience want more. She even teaches Bessie how to dress as a man and enjoy the thrill of smoking and gambling with men dressed that way. It reminded me of the stories I read that told of private clubs where women could be gender fluid and embrace masculine expressions without fear of bodily harm from violent homophobes.

Black love in all forms is front and center, and a new love comes in the form of Jack Gee (Michael Kenneth Williams being fierce and nuanced in this role), a man who sees Bessie perform, and goes to her hotel uninvited. As Bessie lies in bed, still in her nightgown and headscarf, her brother and business partner Clarence (Tory Kittles) watching her back, Jack Gee tells her his personal stats and proclaims without haste, “I’m auditioning to be your man.” He’s bold as brass and Bessie eventually marries him, and keeps her girlfriend Lucille too.

Jack seems very much Bessie’s equal, and they do go toe to toe with their hard loving, hard fighting and hard drinking. It’s a fragile relationship that hinges on Bessie’s Achilles heel, which is a bottomless hunger that stems from the loss of a mother at an early age, and the dysfunctional relationship she has with her older sister Viola (Khandi Alexander). Viola used to lock up food in the family refrigerator and beat on Bessie. This back-story told in flashbacks is the key to Bessie’s insatiable need for more success, more money, more lovers, and more control over her family. She eventually buys a large house without telling Jack, bringing everyone (including her sister Viola and Lucille) under one roof. She ignores her husband’s complaints and forces her will on everyone. She will live the life she felt was denied her, and even brings home a little boy on Thanksgiving to be her and Jack’s son. It’s Bessie’s world and everyone is expected to fall in line and gravitate around her.

The best part of Bessie is how she handles the intrusion of the White Gaze on the storyline. Bessie’s world seems insulated from white intrusion, and this allows us to focus on the Black characters just being themselves without having to focus on the known and ubiquitous racism. Whiteness does seep in through the colorism issues that Bessie encounters with the infamous paper bag test (Black performers, even in Black entertainment spaces of the period, did not hire darker skinned Black women who were not lighter than a paper bag). White intrusion is most prominent in two scenes, one involving the Klan showing up at one of Bessie’s performances, and the other at a prominent white patron’s home.

In the Klan sequence, Bessie simply walks outside and cusses the white men out and chases them away. She doesn’t quake in her boots or shrink behind the protection of Black men. She then turns around and goes back to performing, winning over the respect of the frightened Black men and women who were prepared to run away from White terrorism intruding onto Black space. In the home of Carl Van Vechten (Oliver Platt), a controversial patron of Negro artists whom he finds crude, primitive, and folksy, Bessie turns the White Gaze (and cultural appropriation) on its head by being true to her unfiltered Blackness. When a white woman puts her hands on Bessie in an attempt to hug her and says, “I heard that you were wild,” Bessie pushes her away and says, “Get the fuck off me.” Bessie in one fell swoop refused to let the white woman turn her body into a commodity. She turns on Carl Van Vechten too when he tells her about his book Nigger Heaven. This is a tremendous sequence because Bessie doesn’t allow the White characters to hijack the narrative and center the story on Bessie having to impress Van Vechten to get something from him for her survival. Bessie doesn’t give a fuck about anyone in that room except for herself and the two lovers she brought with her. In fact, Bessie doesn’t even care what Langston Hughes (Jeremie Harris) has to say when he tries to warn her about Van Vechten’s fetishizing of Black culture and Black people.

I found it fascinating watching Hughes take in Bessie’s behavior towards Van Vechten, because Hughes had to depend on White patrons much like Van Vechten to supplement his income in order to write and survive. Bessie didn’t. She had her voice and she had regular working class Black people who came out to see her when she travelled. Eventually she made records, (there’s the hilarious moment where she goes to a Black record company called Black Swan Records and discovers the company isn’t as Black as she thought, and that she is too Black for them), and was able to gain new revenue from vinyl sales. Bessie never had to water down her personality to make White folks feel comfortable. Unfortunately Hughes and other writers of their time (like my favorite Harlem Renaissance writer, Zora Neale Hurston) had to walk a thin line of creating the art they wanted without offending Whites who funded that art. It still happens today. Recently, poet and Buzzfeed Literary Editor Saeed Jones wrote about this same issue with his recent piece Self-Portrait Of The Artist As Ungrateful Black Writer.

Bessie is a good primer movie for people who know nothing about Bessie Smith, and it is a breakthrough performance for Queen Latifah. The cast is flawless and I expect Emmy nods for Queen Latifah, Mo’Nique and Khandi Alexander. (Khandi can do anything and just be dynamite. Period.) It was a pleasure watching unapologetic Black, female, queerness. I hope HBO takes more chances on projects like this. Somebody get Dee Rees financing for a new movie stat. It is maddening to think that she hasn’t had an opportunity since Pariah in 2011 to show us her voice. She has more radical stories to tell. I can feel it.

‘Beyond the Lights’ Premiere: Interviews with Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Gina Prince-Bythewood

Gina Price-Bythewood: “It’s a love story first, but for me as a filmmaker, I never just want to make a movie that entertains. It should entertain first, but I think it should say something and this was an issue that was important to me, the way woman are objectified. The way that women don’t have a voice. As an artist I was able to put that into the film as well as someone who has something to say and sometimes it’s a struggle to get the chance, to just inspire women, also men, to have their own voice.”

New+York+Premiere+Relativity+Media+Beyond+JSRkDgZtCe6l — Gugu Mbatha-Raw, left, and Gina Prince-Bythewood

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

Read ahead for interviews with Beyond the Lights star, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and director, Gina Prince-Bythewood.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw, so good earlier this year in Amma Asante’s Belle as a biracial woman raised in aristocracy in slave-era England, is just as impressive in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Beyond the Lights as Noni, a pop singer who yearns for her identity and authenticity even as she’s pushed to perform sexy numbers in skimpy costumes. Mbatha-Raw’s fiery performance, which showcases her talent as a singer and dancer, just earned her a Gotham nomination for best actress to include her in the company of Julianne Moore and Scarlett Johansson.

As for the talented director, Prince-Bythewood, it’s been way too long between movies; her last feature film was The Secret Life of Bees in 2008, and before that, the critically acclaimed Love & Basketball, back in 2000.

I chatted with Mbatha-Raw and Prince-Bythewood on the red carpet at the New York premiere of Beyond the Lights last week.

Co-stars Nate Parker, who plays the security guard who becomes her love interest after he saves her from a suicide attempt, and rapper Colson “Machine Gun Kelly” Baker, who told me he writes lyrics that respect women, joined Mbatha-Raw on the red carpet, along with writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood and her producer husband, Reggie Rock Bythewood. (Minnie Driver, who gives a powerhouse performance as Noni’s manipulative “momager,” and in one of the best scenes in the movie has a blow-out argument with Noni over the direction of her career, was sadly not at the premiere.)

First I got to speak to Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who went from the film’s pop diva vixen in the film to an elegant 1940s-style Hollywood glamour queen on the red carpet.
Bitch Flicks: How did the musical scenes come together?

Mbatha-Raw: It’s been such a gift of a role. I grew up singing and dancing as a child, but more sort of musical theater style and classical dancing, so for me to be able to embrace this hip-hop style, you know I had a lot of help. Gina surrounded me with some wonderful people in the industry, not just herself, who’s had a background researching a lot of the hip-hop world, but also Laurieann Gibson, the choreographer (Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry), The Dream (Kanye West, Beyonce, Jay-Z), who wrote all the original music (Rihanna, Kanye West, Beyoncé) and also Machine Gun Kelly, who’s here, who really is a rapper in the industry and brings so much charisma and authenticity cause he really is from that world, so really I sort of had a lot of things to draw upon and felt very well-supported by the research cause we knew about the movie, or I knew about the movie, for almost two years before we got to shoot it.

BF: Were you uncomfortable performing the sexually suggestive numbers?

Mbatha-Raw: I felt very supported by the choreography. We rehearsed it; Laurieann Gibson as I mentioned, created that whole routine and that was something we rehearsed in the studio in front of a mirror for many hours, you know, and adding the elements of the hair, the makeup, the wigs, the amazing hair designs by Kim Kimble (Beyoncé), and the costumes of course, so we really were building this character on so many levels and then it was just really down to kind of doing it and singing the song and projecting that energy into the lens, which was a new experience for me, because usually as an actress you’re pretending the camera isn’t there but obviously for a music video in that style you have to look directly into the camera. And that was scary initially, but I had to get over it.

BF: Talk about your upcoming projects, including Jupiter Ascending, the Wachowski siblings sci-fi film. (It co-stars Eddie Redmayne, Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum.)

Mbatha-Raw: I just have a small role in that, but it’s a really exciting movie. I’m looking forward to seeing it because I haven’t seen it yet. It’s sort of an epic space adventure and I play a character’s who’s half human, half deer.

I also shot a movie in the summer called The Whole Truth with another female director called Courtney Hunt. I don’t know when that’s coming out yet (Renee Zellweger, Keanu Reeves), and I’ve just started work on another project that’s called Compassion with Will Smith about brain injuries in the NFL.
BF: (To director Gina Prince-Bythewood about her search for an actress to play Noni.)

Prince-Bythewood: I thought I wanted a real musical artist in the lead when I first wrote it (2007) and then realized for this character I needed an actor because this character goes into some pretty deep depths. And I found Gugu two years ago and it was an amazing thing to find a woman who had incredible chops, could sing, and was brave enough to go there. And she really is brave.

BF: How did Gugu prepare for the musical numbers?

Prince-Bythewood: She put in so much work. She has a background in musical theater, which I didn’t know originally. But she worked with Debra Byrd, a vocal coach, one of the most renowned, and then the Dream; he did all the original music, and for her it was hours in the studio singing to his demos the way that Noni would, where they tell you exactly how to sing a word, how to breathe, how to sing a note. There’s no control and that’s what I wanted for Gugu the actress to have to experience, because that’s what Noni would experience.

BF: Your movie besides being entertainment has a message. How important was that to you as a filmmaker?

Prince-Bythewood: It’s a love story first, but for me as a filmmaker, I never just want to make a movie that entertains. It should entertain first, but I think it should say something and this was an issue that was important to me, the way woman are objectified. The way that women don’t have a voice. As an artist I was able to put that into the film as well as someone who has something to say and sometimes it’s a struggle to get the chance, to just inspire women, also men, to have their own voice.

BF: You talk about how women are sexually objectified in pop culture, but how do you avoid that trap in your portrayal of Noni doing those sexy moves?

Prince-Bythewood: It starts with the message of the film and Gugu and I talked a lot about why we were doing this film and it was really to talk to young girls who are only emulating what they see right now. Can we give them something else to aspire to? So going in we knew for the character of Noni, the less she wears the less you see of her, that was the mantra, so we had to make a big jump from her as little girl and that sweetness and innocence about her, to the jump to what she is 15 years later. It has to be dramatic so that you wonder what damage happened in between. Trust me, I’m a female filmmaker, it’s a little tough sometimes to shoot things like that, but we had to compete with what the videos are out today and honestly, we could have gone further. If you see what’s out now, so we had to be authentic so that we could take the character on a journey and bring her back to an authentic place and the place that she wants to be.

BF: What’s your next movie?

Prince-Bythewood: It will take me about a year to write. It focuses more on female friendship and the way it changes through the years.

Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from The Artist. Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.