‘Our Song’: Teen Girls Of Color As Heroines of Their Own Lives

In the 90s and early 2000s we seemed on the cusp of a sea change in which a white male teenager wasn’t the default character audiences were supposed to identify with. While films about grown women had stars like Whitney Houston (in ‘The Bodyguard’) Angela Bassett (Oscar-nominated for ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’) and a pre “J. Lo” Jennifer Lopez (in ‘Selena’), films about teenaged girls of color popped up too. Leslie Harris’s ‘Just Another Girl on the IRT’ was released in the early 90s. In 2000 writer-director Jim McKay’s gorgeous, melancholy ‘Our Song,’ about the friendship of three teenaged girls of color (which starred Kerry Washington–in her film debut) opened in theaters.

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Coming-of-age films like the current art house hit Boyhood usually focus on…boys. A girl character can be, like in the Harry Potter films, The Sidekick, (Emma Watson as Hermione) or just The Girlfriend as in Wes Anderson’s early film Rushmore. If we’re lucky we get to see a complex teenage girl character who is The Daugher, like Shailene Woodley in The Descendants. Until recent YA adaptations like The Hunger Games and The Fault in Our Stars a teenaged girl was rarely The Person the film was about. And teen girls of color? Movies are still pretty much never about them.

In the 90s and early 2000s we seemed on the cusp of a sea change in which a white male teenager wasn’t the default character audiences were supposed to identify with. While films about grown women had stars like Whitney Houston (in The Bodyguard) Angela Bassett (Oscar-nominated for What’s Love Got To Do With It) and a pre “J. Lo” Jennifer Lopez (in Selena), films about teenaged girls of color popped up too. Leslie Harris’s Just Another Girl on the IRT was released in the early 90s. In 2000 writer-director Jim McKay’s gorgeous, melancholy Our Song, about the friendship of three teenaged girls of color (which starred Kerry Washington–in her film debut) opened in theaters.

McKay (who is white) has said in interviews that part of why he wanted to make the film was to include the Jackie Robinson Steppers marching band (now known as The Brooklyn Steppers) a Brooklyn institution of Black and Latino young people which incorporates R and B and hip-hop music and dance moves into its repertoire. The scenes with the band (which the three girls all belong to) are a resounding success: all marching bands should be like this one! The real marching band members and the main actresses, Anna Simpson as Joycelyn, Melissa Martinez as Maria, and a very young Washington as Lanisha blend seamlessly into the group. The band leader (Tyrone Brown) is a character many will recognize from their own lives,  especially when he lectures the band in the manner of every teacher, advisor and coach who has implored students to please try harder. Also seamless is the way other scenes of the girls interacting with their acquaintances leaves us unaware of who is a professional and who is not (the film cast people in the neighborhood alongside actors with long lists of credits): this smooth interweaving of scripted and documentary elements reminded me of the Chilean film No and its mix of vintage documentary video with scripted scenes that take place during the same events. McKay also seems to have  a talent equal to Lukas Moodysson’s in writing believable and affecting dialogue for teenage girls. The naturalistic acting of the leads, especially Washington, but also Simpson and Martinez, elevates the sometimes pedestrian talk about clothes and boys into a music of its own.

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During band practice

Seen today, the film is an unwitting nostalgia piece: the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn where the scenes were shot is largely gentrified now. In the film’s action we rarely see a white face, a contrast with recent, independently made films that take place in Brooklyn like Obvious Child and It Felt Like Love in which–as in most mainstream films, no matter where they take place–the audience rarely sees anyone onscreen who is Black or brown. We get a hint of the white influx to come when Joycelyn learns from her new high-status friends what a “mocha” is and teaches it to Lanisha and Maria who, in their mostly low-income neighborhood (which they rarely leave) have never heard the term before. Joycelyn’s job is at what seems to be The Body Shop while Lanisha and Maria work at a local, decidedly non-artisanal bakery.

At work and off Maria and Lanisha sometimes speak Spanish to each other (in one of the film’s many instances of casual bulldozing of stereotypes, Maria starts out knowing no Spanish even though her family is Latino). In one scene Maria tells Lanisha she’s “embarazada.” Lanisha, used to correcting her friend, laughs and says, “‘Embarazada’ doesn’t mean ’embarrassed.’ It means you’re pregnant.”

Maria answers, “I know what it means. I looked it up.”

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Kerry Washington as Lanisha

Maria’s passivity and seeming apathy when confronted with making decisions about her pregnancy, practice with the band, or enrolling in a new school feel true-to-life: her response to these challenges, except in the scene where she confronts the father of her baby–who doesn’t even bother to take off his headphones when she tells him the news– seems to be one big shrug, with a teenager’s lack of regard for later repercussions. Of course, of the three mothers we see, Maria’s is, by far, the least understanding and most strict: teenagers who figure out that their parents are unreasonable are usually the ones who get into the most trouble.

The film is a treasure trove of thoughtful  characters who are women of color, not just the three girls but also Marlene Forte as Lanisha’s mother, gently trying to warn her daughter about her charming father’s broken promises, and even, in a brief scene, a counselor (Iris Little Thomas) who makes Maria laugh when she tells her that she too was quiet when she was her age, but now nobody can get her to shut up. About Maria’s pregnancy the counselor says, “I was just remembering ’15’ and just wondering what you might like to do.”

In the film’s closeups (the stunning cinematography is by Jim Denault) we see how little imagination fashion magazines and mainstream TV and films have in their extremely narrow vision of what makes girls and women “beautiful.” On nights out, when she undoes her usual thick braid, Maria has a glorious, long, full, frizzy lion’s mane of hair, set off by huge hoop earrings; Joycelyn’s almond eyes and velvety, dark skin are highlighted by her sparkly eyeshadow (which her very young mother, to whom she has a strong resemblance–and who acts more like her buddy and roommate–seems to borrow) and Lanisha, whose radiant, expressive face is both familiar to us, from Washington’s later stardom, and not–Washington is less slender here than we’re used to seeing her, with shorter hair and in belted, baggy jeans (fashionable for teen girls then) instead of the well-cut designer clothing she wears on the red carpet or on Scandal.

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At a time when neighborhoods of mostly Black and Latino people were demonized as full of gangs and lawlessness, the only crime we see is when the girls shoplift new clothing for themselves. The film’s one instance of deadly violence is a despair-ridden murder-suicide. At the makeshift, poster board memorial for the victims, the three girls solemnly place the roses Joycelyn, though she is spending more and more time with her new friends, bought at the bodega for each of them.

The “our song” of the title is “Ooh Child” which the band rehearses and we also hear on the radio (the 1990s Chyna version, not the original Five Stairsteps’ version from the 70s). The girls first hear the song together and then, more poignantly, when they’re apart.

The girls’ increasing estrangement is a reality not often depicted on film, where friendship (unless it involves an obvious villain or some big blowout fight) usually equals “forever.” But for most of us, different people drift in and out of our lives in high school and beyond. In the last shots of the film we see a long closeup of Lanisha by herself, without either friend at her side. We recognize she is having her first, sad inkling that most of her “best friends” will move on and away from her–or she will move on from them.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jINf6OTWyUE”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

 

‘Whale Rider’: Women And Children First

Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance, one of the few successful women musicians who made the transition to film composer (she won a Golden Globe for her work on ‘Gladiator’), wrote and performed the music for 2002’s ‘Whale Rider’–and she didn’t have to date writer-director Niki Caro to do so. Gerrard might seem an unlikely choice: when I briefly worked in a women’s sex shop in the 90s, the store owner told me not to play Dead Can Dance on the sound system because they scared away customers. But Gerrard’s score for ‘Rider’ does what the best movie music is supposed to do: reinforcing the drama of the film without calling unnecessary attention to itself.

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This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Movie Soundtracks.

When I listened to post-punk and New Wave bands as a teenager in the ’80s I never dreamed that members of some of those bands would someday write the scores for successful, mainstream films: Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo composed the music for many movies including Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. Danny Elfman of Oingo Boingo is the composer for Edward ScissorhandsGood Will Hunting and more.  These two men followed a path that Randy Newman–who was a great, satirical songwriter before he became the composer for films like Toy Story–and Henry Mancini, composer of the score for Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Pink Panther, tread before them. This pipeline has not, historically, been open to women musicians, even though Kate Bush, for example, was popular at the same time Devo and Oingo Boingo were, and during that time put out music that could already pass for the soundtrack to a movie. Although Karen O of The Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs was nominated for an Oscar this year for her work on the movie Her, she also, at one time, dated the film’s director which shouldn’t be a prerequisite for a woman (or anyone else) getting the job.

Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance, one of the few successful women musicians who made the transition to film composer (she won a Golden Globe for her work on Gladiator), wrote and performed the music for 2002’s Whale Rider-and she didn’t have to date writer-director Niki Caro to do so. Gerrard might seem an unlikely choice: when I briefly worked in a women’s sex shop in the 90s, the store owner told me not to play Dead Can Dance on the sound system because they scared away customers. But Gerrard’s score for Rider does what the best movie music is supposed to do: reinforcing the drama of the film without calling unnecessary attention to itself.

Pai and her grandfather
Pai and her grandfather

Whale Rider is an adaptation of the book of the same name by Māori author Witi Ihimaera about an 11-year-old girl (played by Keisha Castle-Hughes with the same confidence and solemnity Quvenzhané Wallis brought to Beasts of The Southern Wild; both girls received well-deserved Oscar nominations) who believes she is destined to become chief of the Māori living in the small community of Whangara, New Zealand, and her conflict with her grandfather, the aging chief, who believes only men can lead.

Pai’s grandfather (Rawiri Paratene) is often cold toward her, seeming to blame her for the death of her twin brother at birth, whom he believed was destined to be the community’s leader. Pai says, “(He) wished in his heart that I’d never been born, but he changed his mind.” In spite of himself, the grandfather sometimes shows great affection for and great pride in his granddaughter, letting her ride with him on his bicycle and telling her the legend about an ancestor (for whom Pai is named) migrating to New Zealand on top of a whale.

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Pai’s grandmother

Although sexism seems entrenched in their traditions (as they are in so many Western ones) the Māori women (played, as all of the nonwhite characters are, by people who are actually Māori) in the film are hardly doormats. When the grandfather is so upset at the loss of his newborn grandson that he barely acknowledges his granddaughter, the grandmother (Vicky Haughton) ignores her husband and coos to the baby girl, “Just say the word and I’ll get a divorce.”

The grandmother’s friends aren’t above teasing and laughing at Pai and are bawdy when they talk to each other. When Pai tells these older women to stop smoking because it will interfere with their reproductive capabilities, the women raise their eyebrows and after she leaves, one retorts, “You’d have to be smoking in a pretty funny place to wreck your childbearing properties.”

Pai is given the chance to stay with her father, a successful artist in Germany, who says of his father (the grandfather) and his hopes that a young male leader will rid the community of the poverty and malaise we see, including casual drug and alcohol abuse, “He’s just looking for something that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Pai agrees to go live with her father, and the shiny, new SUV they ride in as they leave the grandfather’s modest house is a world away from the bicycle the grandfather uses to get around. But when they pass the ocean we hear Gerrard’s distinctive vocals, akin both to whale “singing” and to the traditional Māori chants we hear in the film. Pai, feeling like the whales are calling to her, opts to stay.

Pai passes her grandfather's test
Pai passes her grandfather’s test

While her grandfather starts to train the ragtag group of “first-born sons” in the ancient ways. Pai, with encouragement from her grandmother and some coaching from her uncle, masters songs, dances and weapon training–without letting her grandfather know she is doing so–too. The grandfather throws his carved whale tooth pendant into the ocean from his boat and waits for one of the boys who accompany him to bring it back, but he takes to his bed when none of the boys can pass this final “sword in the stone” test. Pai, later on a boat with her uncle, his drinking buddies and girlfriend, dives to the bottom and retrieves both the pendant and a lobster at the same time.

Gerrard’s ethereal vocal style combined with electronic flourishes make for an unusual soundtrack, but one that meshes with the film’s bracing mixture of mysticism and realism set against the strange and beautiful New Zealand landscape with its high grey cliffs and bright green hills (which audiences might recognize from The Lord of the Rings movies) better than a more traditional soundtrack from John Williams (or Randy Newman) would. When Pai pushes her forehead into the skin of a beached whale, then climbs the clusters of barnacles on its side to steer the animal into the water, the sound of the waves melds with the music and we feel like we are taking off with her.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtZC5OOxoAQ”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.