Love & Generational Stories ft. 2 Black Filmmakers
Peter & Maria in Cane River, 1982
Over the weekend, I watched three different films written and directed by Black filmmakers, each centered around love, family, and uncovering lost history. One of the films has a lost history of its own that I get to towards the end.
The first film I watched was The Photograph, starring Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield, which came out in 2020. I remember when it first came out, there were lots of critical reviews. People thought it was boring, that it was slow-paced, etc. There was lots of back and forth as some folks pushed back against those who called it boring, arguing that people were addicted to stories that only showed Black trauma and plight and that’s why they weren’t able to appreciate the film. That rationale never really rang true to me, but the negative reviews sunk in enough that I never made time to watch the movie. Then a few days ago, I saw an Instagram post from someone who had just watched the movie for the first time themselves, and they reiterated the same argument that Black people aren’t used to seeing Black romance stories or stories that don’t have to do with trauma.
Part of the reason this argument doesn’t hold up water is that we do have lots of Black movies that focus on love and not trauma, so that couldn’t explain why people didn’t like The Photograph. I decided to watch the movie written and directed by Stella Meghie, who has also directed two great episodes of Insecure, and I instantly loved Meghie’s thoughtfulness and the care she took in depicting this mysterious, brooding love story. Overall, The Photograph was a beautifully directed movie with a sweet story that just needed a little more time to bake.
The Photograph didn’t struggle because it’s trauma-porn-free, its Achilles’ heel is a script that may have benefited from one or two more rewrites. The story follows Rae’s character, Mae Morton as she learns about her mother Christina Eames’ (played by Chanté Adams) past. The way it’s written, however, Mae doesn’t feel like the main character. Her character is relatively flat with little to no arc, and despite the fact that she’s the protagonist, the movie starts off with Stanfield’s character Michael Block interviewing Isaac Jefferson (played by Rob Morgan) in Louisiana for a story. The film spends a lot of time on Christina and Isaac’s story, which is incredibly beautiful, but it takes away from the central love story between Mae and Michael.
In my opinion, there are three ways this story could have been tightened up. The first two options would hold on to the integrity of the romance genre by narrowing the focus. We could have zoomed in entirely on the story between Christina and Isaac with a new movie title and premise. The chemistry between Chanté Adams and Y’lan Noel (Daniel King from Insecure), who plays a young Isaac, was so riveting and beautiful, and the underlying story of Christina and the man she left behind was gorgeous enough to be its own movie.
Or, if Meghie really wanted this to be a romance story between Mae and Michael, we would have needed a tighter story arc that gets the audience invested in the love story between Rae and Stanfield much earlier on. This would require either less focus on Christina and Isaac’s storyline or finding ways to draw deeper parallels and contrasts between the two couples. To be sure, there are points in the movie where we see this, such as Stanfield and Rae standing in her mother’s photography room together or Stanfield moving away to chase his dreams, like Mae’s mom. But for it to work, there would need to be a much clearer correlation between these stories so we could feel the cohesion between Mae and her mother.
Finally, the last option would have been to make this a family story focused on Mae and her mother’s relationship as well as Isaac and Christina’s relationship, with a resolution that brings Mae and Isaac together. Ultimately this would have been a story of reconciliation and return which would have been really beautiful to see. This option would require a rework of Stanfield’s character because the film, as is, focused too much attention on Michael in moments where we should have been learning more about Mae. Stanfield’s character could have been a supporting role as Mae’s love interest while she uncovered her family’s history.
Meghie actually does this in one of her films Jean of the Joneses (2016) which I decided to watch after I finished The Photograph to get a better sense of Meghie’s story-telling. Despite my issues with The Photograph and without having seen anything else written by Meghie yet, I could instinctively feel that she is a phenomenal writer.
So, I pulled up Jean of the Joneses starring Taylour Paige (who bodies this role) on Amazon and I loved it! In this film, Meghie tells another generational story about a young woman who is figuring out her life and also finding out truths about her family history after the grandfather she never knew dies on her grandmother’s doorstep. However, in this story, the protagonist, Jean, has a full character arc that we’re invested in from the very first scene. Meghie focuses on the family dynamic between Jean, her mother, her aunts—her mother’s sisters—and her grandmother, the matriarch. Her love interest (played by Mamoudou Athie) is the secondary story, which is still packed with enough chemistry to keep us wanting more.
Meghie’s writing here is sharp and clear as she explores themes of motherhood, parenthood, and family dynamics, and Jean would have been rather instructive for the third rewrite option for The Photograph. Similarly, the last movie I watched follows a similar premise that ties these three films together.
After I finished Jean, I watched Cane River, written and directed by Emmy-award-winning television director and producer Horace B. Jenkins, and I am OBSESSED. I found this film through the Black Film Archive and I was able to watch it for free using my library card which is so awesome! Cane River is another trauma-lite love story intertwined with recovering family history, just as in both of Meghie’s films. Cane River gets at what Meghie attempted in The Photograph of weaving in a generational story while telling a new love story in the present.
What Cane River gets right is the way it balances Peter Metoyer’s (played by Richard Romain, who is amazing to look at in his boot-cut jeans) journey of learning about his family’s troubled past with his burgeoning love for Maria Mathis (played by Tommye Myrick). The film explores themes of class and colorism, and while it has a few didactic scenes, it remains focused on the love story between Peter and Maria. The overall cinematography of this film is so beautiful and captivating that I had to pause at times just to take it in.
Cane River was Horace B. Jenkins’ first and only feature film; he died shortly after the movie’s release in May 1982. According to IndieWire, Richard Pryor attended the screening in disguise and loved it so much that he offered to lend his star power to raise awareness for the film, but the financiers of the film (who were also Black) declined for fear of losing control of the film. Then the negatives were lost, never to be seen again for three decades, and were only recently recovered in 2013. The film was re-released, and now, Cane River is available to stream digitally if you have a library card. (Support your local library, friends.)
All three of these movies explore love, family history, and what we owe to one another in relationship and kinship. I stumbled upon Cane River, and I’m so glad I did, because it not only fits in so well with the premises in both of Meghie’s films, but it also pushes back against the narrative that we don’t have trauma-free stories. Cane River, like Jean, doesn’t shy away from the complicated and difficult histories bound up in being Black and/or being a woman in America. Those facts are woven in as reality, and yet, the love within these stories remains at the center, transcending and healing the pain.