For Colored Girls (film).
Okay so I was hesitant to write about this film because it’s Tyler Perry and also because when I was a teenager, I went to see it in the movies, and I hadn’t read the choreopoem it was based on and I didn’t know what it was about and I definitely didn’t know there would be so much trauma in it so I left like was this for colored girls? Because I definitely did not feel like it was for me.
More than anything, I remember watching Michael Ealy playing a traumatized veteran dangling his children out the apartment window. Me, watching him, holding my breath.
I also remember the teenage dancer—who I now realize was Tessa Thompson!—accidentally getting pregnant (my greatest fear back then despite how little—read: none—sex I was having). Her having to go to a back alley to try to sort it out.
I remember watching this movie at the theatre around the time I watched Precious, which similarly disturbed me for all of its violence and trauma. Because I guess there is the trauma of real life—some of which I’d experienced, a lot of which I hadn’t—and the trauma of the big screen, and the big screen trauma always tries to milk the real for all it’s worth, somehow becoming both more and less present than what it’s supposed to represent.
I wasn’t prepared for that back then, and so when I rewatched this movie for school this week, I was already tense when I pressed play. Of course, all of the intense moments from last time still happened, but what I liked about this movie is how everyone who was hurting in the middle of it—no matter how intensely—found some semblance of healing by the end.
I study Black distress and how it’s portrayed on TV and in movies and in books and if these portrayals affect the ways we understand and respond to Black emotional pain in real life. I liked that as totally distressing as this film is for its chorus of Black women (which includes so many stars like Kerry Washington, Thandiwe Newton, Whoopi Goldberg, Tessa Thompson, Janet Jackson, Kimberly Elise, Loretta Devine), everyone has moments where they get to linger on their pain without that pain consuming them, eating them up. They all get to linger, and a lot of them help each other get past it without acting like the lingering isn’t crucial for the healing.
I liked that as earnestly theatrical as this movie was sometimes—characters breaking into monologues from the choreopoem now and then—everyone seemed to be leaning in, taking the thing seriously, seeing their character through their particular hard times, and I liked how we were both with them when it hurt the most and with them afterward without them ever becoming especially stereotypical or flat.
I know Madea is not our favorite contribution to Black culture, but I lowkey really liked how Tyler Perry handled this one, how he fostered a space where so many of these women could lean in and explore Black female emotional pain without it becoming indulgent or for somebody else. I also for the most part liked how he represented queerness in this film—one of the Black women’s husbands is queer and the conversation he ends up having with his wife is more forward thinking than I expected from any movie (especially a Black one) in 2010.
I did not leave as stiff as I did when I watched this movie as a teenager, and for that I’m grateful. Exposed to more than I had been back then, I left considering the healing—the healing these characters did by the end of the movie and my own healing in the past decade or so. I mentioned this a bit last week, but it is good to know you can heal from things, that you are rarely so far gone that no one can reach you, and even then, you might just be able to find your way through.
Image: Lionsgate
Note: There’s a pretty intense sexual assault scene that happens so be wary of that if you want to check it out.
Also, the film’s based on Ntozake Shange’s 1975 choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, which is worth checking out too.
