| The Lena Waithe-penned film about a young singer on the brink of stardom hiding a relationship with her best friend stumbles with too many wrong notes Beauty, a coming-of-age music drama written by Lena Waithe and directed by Andrew Dosunmu, purports to tell the story of a fictional young singer in early 1980s New Jersey on the brink of stardom. She is tall, willowy and black, frequently clad in shoulder pads and bright colors, first seen smoking a joint in her bedroom that her older brother warns will damage her voice – a voice which, we’re told, is once in a generation, though we never hear it. Beauty (Gracie Marie Bradley), as she’s oddly called, frequently sings, but the film layers background music or silence over her voice, keeping it at a remove. It’s a central void emblematic of a hollow film which has little to say about anyone or anything, and onto which one will obviously project their feelings for one Whitney Houston. Waithe, a professed Whitney fan, has written a film that hews so closely to her biography that it feels inaccurate to call it anything other than an unauthorized biopic or, more accurately, fan fiction for Houston’s early intimate relationship with longtime friend and assistant Robyn Crawford. Which could be fine – Valérie Lemercier’s Aline is a successful unauthorized fan tribute to Celine Dion through its sincere bizarreness; there’s certainly plenty to explore in Houston and Crawford’s close friendship and physical relationship, which Crawford later said Houston ended to avoid scrutiny in her early career. But Beauty simply uses the relationship template for aesthetic, a vessel for a mood, as if to view their youthful, doomed romance through the lens of a modern music video. Dosunmu, an established music video director, assembles beautiful shots of longing, pain, yearning, closeness and jealousy between Beauty and girlfriend Jazz (Aleyse Shannon). But strung together by Waithe’s too-spare script, they feel isolated and go nowhere. Continue reading... |
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