Trying 'Something New'

By Esther Iverem
SeeingBlack.com Editor and Film Critic

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Love stories proceed with their own gimmicks and ticks centered on the difficulty of hooking up in the modern age—cross-country romance (Sleepless in Seattle”), single mama drama (“Jerry Maguire”), and now two gay men (“Brokeback Mountain”).

Of the few taboo movie romances involving a Black woman and a White man in America—“The Bodyguard,” “Love Song” and now “Something New”—there is the repeated motif of the haughty, de-natured Black diva rescued from her claustrophobic environment of staid, middle class Negroes. Along comes her blond-haired beau who is salt-of-the-earth and not haughty at all. He is more down than L.L. Cool J! There is a reversal of the actual class conditions of most Black women and White men. And there is, perhaps, the implication that the Black woman is the one who is really racist if she—for some odd reason— prefers not to date White men.

But such movies, both feel-good and angst-driven, can’t dwell on the dull business of race history, or income versus net worth. (Last year’s “Guess Who” was more about the Black father and his daughter’s White suitor). And we would really have a fit if Hollywood asked us to accept a Black modern version of Pygmalion, a true around-the-way-girl, being groomed by her wealthy White suitor. Yuck!

There are two factors that allow “Something New” to break the mold of swirl as usual. First, a real actress, Sanaa Lathan, plays the lead role of Kenya, a successful Los Angeles accounting manager about to make partner at her firm, who meets a White landscape architect, Brian (Simon Baker). As our first, real Black romantic heroine, from her performances in “Love and Basketball,” “Disappearing Acts” and “Brown Sugar,” Lathan is able to evoke that every-woman sympathy of the viewer that was nowhere to be found in the over-the-top performances by singers Whitney Houston and Monica Arnold in “The Bodyguard” or “Love Song.” Lathan makes us like Kenya and we want to like her, even with her particular foibles and idiosyncrasies. And besides, most of us don’t want cobwebs in our hair, don’t want to get our hairdo wet, don’t want dogs in our house and, while we may not want to be in that 42.4 percent of today’s Black women who don’t marry, we don’t want to keep on dating busters either.

This film has the added advantage of admirable and frank dialogue about race in the script by Kriss Turner, who has writer and producer credits for several television shows, including “Everybody Hates Chris,” “The Bernie Mac Show” and “Whoopi.” Kenya and Brian actually have onscreen conversations where they vent about their differing ideas about how racism figures into the world both outside of their relationship and inside of it.

These conversations are not the knock-down, drag-out variety we have at Black gatherings but they don’t have to be. They give the film a refreshing sense of authenticity missing from other, more superficial, efforts. Yes, in this film also produced, written and directed by Black women, there is something new, and it’s not just a White man.

Esther Iverem’s new book of poems, “Living in Babylon,” is available at Amazon.com. On Sunday, Mar. 12, she will be moderating a panel on Black film at the Reel Sisters Film Festival in Brooklyn, N.Y.

— February 3, 2006

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