'Love Come Down' in Black and White

by Esther Iverem
SeeingBlack.com Editor and Film Critic

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Sometimes a film possesses a depth of emotion and is superbly acted but, ultimately, it does not work. Its flaw, which involves its message, only becomes apparent about half way through the plot. Love Come Down is one such a blessed and cursed creation.

Director and writer Clement Virgo's story of inter-racial family conflict, drug abuse and emotional chaos centers on two half brothers, one Black and one White. The youngest and darkest brother, Neville (Larenz Tate) is an aspiring comedian who works as a store clerk to support himself. At night, he loves to dance at the local club where the women are willing and the drugs are free-flowing. In fact, Neville has a drug problem and the film is punctuated in several places with his arrival and departure from a rehabilitation program run by nuns.

The eldest brother, Matthew (Martin Cummins), is an aspiring boxer who seems to spend much of his time working out, wrecking his personal relationships and protecting Neville from himself. He is the one who repeatedly rescues his brother from the men's room at the nightclub where Neville is always melting, injecting or sniffing something. It is Matthew who comes time and time again to pick his brother up from rehab. In a pivotal moment in the plot—fraught with biblical intensity—Matthew rises up in righteous indignation against his brother and we wonder if he might actually kill him.

There is certainly nothing wrong or unprecedented in the displaying of Black pathology in film. But in Love Come Down it is the repeated and multi-layered theme of Black pathology versus White strength and indignation that ultimately beats up the conscious viewer. Not only is Matthew forever saving his little brother from himself, their relationship echoes the twisted relationship their White mother had with Neville's Black Caribbean father. As it turns out, dad liked to smoke a joint from time to time and he sometimes forced the weed onto the boys. Neville complied (and ultimately wound up a drug addict) while the eldest boy, the White one, rightly resisted. And, of course, once mama found out about these little drug sessions she was furious and rose up against a man stupid enough to give his own children drugs.

The same pattern of pathology versus strength is repeated in Neville's relationship with a Black woman who was "adopted" by a White couple. In that situation, The (great?) White father looks on in disgust as his daughter, now grown, has brought home a series of boy toys. As it turns out, the real reason for his resentment of the girl and her existence only underscores further the theme of Black pathology. In this film, Whites are constantly cleaning up the messes of their Black brethren, and cleaning up themselves after some regrettable contact with a dark body. Whether he intended it or not, Virgo's poetic and moody story works only as a warning to Whites of the consequences of their love coming down in a dark direction.

Screened at Acapulco Black Film Festival 2001.

-- June 21, 2001

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