The year is 1989 and New Jack Swing is about to push black culture from the margins to the mainstream. The question for the black employees of Culture, the music TV station at the center of writer-…
), who scowls at Anna’s short, natural curls and orders her to get a weave. And so ambitious Anna stitches her scalp with a stranger’s long, straight hair which, to her despair, literally slays.,” beauty standards bring pain. Anna’s hair is a battleground. After an opening scene of a preteen hair-straightening gone wrong, she refuses to let it be touched. Combs, needles, scissors are obvious threats.
Lorraine plays Anna as timid and hunched, a wallflower who rarely gets to flash her dynamite smile. She makes the audience want to protect her on sight. Yet, her on-again, off-again ex, a callous host with a formidable flattop , hints that Anna has a dominant side she keeps tucked away in a drawer of bondage gear.Hair, however, turns out to make a wicked weapon itself. To Simien, the tossing of lock over shoulder is as threatening as flipping open a switchblade.
Simien, detouring from his heralded work as the creator of the hit film and TV show “Dear White People,” is clearly delighted to play with his genre influences, whether directing his own pitch-perfect music videos within the movie that send up Janet Jackson and Another Bad Creation, or processing the film to look like a grainy VHS tape from an alternate dimension where the biggest star is a luscious-haired diva named Sandra .
Simien’s also enlisted great supporting players. Williams is a hoot, as is Laverne Cox’s fully-booked stylist,’s disgruntled co-worker, and Usher’s hustling producer, plus a quick cameo from hip hop legend MC Lyte. Despite the jump scares, Simien is serious about his message. He wants to be clear that he feels black women have been subjected to centuries of cultural oppression aimed at convincing them that their natural hair is a flaw. Even if Anna hadn’t sewn on a deadly weave, she was still pressured to spend her rent money on a superficiality, or face a barrier to her success.
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