For Colored Girls

So I finally saw a Tyler Perry movie and no I did not like it. From the several issues I had with this movie, the main question that struck me (again) was: Why do narratives about black womanhood always have to be centered around rape or another form of abuse? In this film, we had abuse thrown at us every five minutes, there was the woman who got raped, the woman who was abused by her psychotic alcoholic somehow zombie-like husband, the overly promiscuous woman who sort of abused herself by offering herself to every man available, the woman who suffered in an unhappy marriage with a closet gay husband, the woman who was betrayed and left by her lover again and again etc. The 'message' that this film and others convey, think about the abuse scene in She's Gotta Have It or the scene in Waiting To Exhale where she is left by her husband in the meanest way possible after sacrificing everything for him, is that black women's lives are just a huge pile of agony and tears and no matter what they do and how hard they try their shots at happiness are doomed to fail in the end. I haven't seen the original play and I understand that Tyler Perry was trying to make a point that women (and not only black women by the way) often suffer from abuse or get raped, but these scenes in the film were also ruined by ridiculous and exaggerated melodrama and implausible character development. Take the scene where Yasmine is raped in her apartment. This was indeed a strong scene and well acted, although it was clear after the first 5 minutes of the film that one of the characters gets raped because apparently you cannot tell a story about women without involving rape, although my bet was on Thandie Newton's character. But afterwards we see her in the hospital, just hours after she had been raped and experienced a very traumatic situation, and I am supposed to believe that her way of dealing with it is to give an essay-like speech to the policeman about the problems of rape and also society in general? That did not seem very likely to me. Generally, after suffering a terrible situation, each character was given a monologue, which to me often seemed misplaced or too far out of context. The male characters in the film were also too unbelievable to me. Take the rapist for example. He said in the beginning of the film that he had been accompanying Yasmine on her way to work for several weeks, and he took her out to dinner etc. So he has been a nice gentleman for several weeks, put a lot of effort into getting closer to her, but then when she invites him to her house after already going out with him, and it is clear that she likes him and they will soon have sex anyway, he suddenly snaps and transforms into this violent rapist? That seemed too unbelievable for me. Or the guy that Tangie (Thandie Newton) picks up at the bar and takes home, who offers her money and then leaves laughing. She is working as a bartender in a very high-class bar, so why would he assume she is a hooker? Hill Harper's character was the only one that was believable to me, and I am not saying this because he was the only nice guy, but just because his character's actions were the only ones that made any sense to me. I was also disappointed by Michael Ealy's character. Ok he was traumatized by war, without any further explanations given, but the scene in the end where he throws his children out of the window was good for melodramatic effect but again seemed too illogical to me. Did he do it out of jealousy or because she did not want to marry him? And why would he throw his kids out of the window because of that? To achieve what? Just because he is traumatized and drunk is not a good explanation. But that may be just my own perception. Overall, I thought the cast all gave strong performances, although I thought some talent was wasted on narrow character development, for example Whoopi Goldberg as the religious fanatic. One of the biggest problems was also the structure of the narrative. It was basically depicting the suffering of the woman, then let her recite a poem or let her have some other sort of monologue, and then repeat this pattern with every other character for the rest of the movie. What you then had in the end was just a compilation of endless suffering without a real consecutive narrative, and after sitting through this movie for two and a half hours, I just wanted it to end. The repetitive narrative pattern made the characters seem somewhat interchangeable, and in the end instead of several different women with individual destinies, they seemed like one big pile of miserable abused black womanhood. I think the film had way more potential than this, but the filmmakers focused too much on melodrama.