Hi everyone!
We’re taking a week off from Takeover Tuesday as we work to retool the process. However, we’re also look for collaborators for the month of October. If you might be interested in writing and recording a review for this podcast, head over to onemoviepunch.com/takeover-tuesday to read up on the process and to get in contact with me. You can even see some of the benefits I can offer for participating.
And now...
Today’s movie is “Nappily Ever After” (2018), the Netflix Original romantic dramedy directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour, and written for the screen by Adam Brooks and Cee Marcellus, based on the novel by Trisha R. Thomas. The film follows Violet Jones (Sanaa Lathan), who has a seemingly perfect life with upward mobility and a well-maintained head of hair. However, after she loses her hair in an accident, her life begins to fall apart, and she begins re-evaluating the direction of her life.
Spoilers ahead.
I can imagine folks who haven’t studied African American history to see this film as all fluff, just a black woman who is obsessed with her hair that discovers she just doesn’t have to meet other people’s standards anymore and grows as a person. And sure, without understanding African American history, you could easily summarize the film in this way. But the film is actually a larger discussion about long-standing attempts to “Europeanize” African Americans, from how they were forced to dress themselves as slaves, to what was expected by white business owners for employment, to how they needed to look and act to be accepted into suburban neighborhoods. It’s also a discussion about the counter-culture back to African fashions for some populations, and an effort to invent a new style for new generations, and all the politics and social cues that go into that. It’s not just hair, and to minimize it in that way is also part of that “Europeanization”, even if we call it “The American Way” today.
“Nappily Ever After” takes those themes and builds a romantic dramedy around those premises, creating a strong story of personal growth for our initially flawed protagonist, Violet. The film is structured around six stages in her life: her actual hair; a weave after her hair is ruined; a blonde dye job; an emotional shaving experience; regrowth, and finally, nappily. Each hairstyle before bald is because someone has done something to her, and each hairstyle afterwards is because she has done something for herself. But despite the structure, and strong messaging, the rest of the film just kind of happens. Things go bad between Violet and her current boyfriend Clint (Ricky Whittle), who is pretty much a perfect douchebag. Then she meets hairdresser Will (Lyriq Bent) and his show-stealing daughter Zoe (Daria Johns), who both think she should just be herself. Then she has a rough night out and decides to shave it off, which is a key moment in the novel, but that doesn’t translate well to the screen.
Then her relationship with Will falls apart trying to appease her mother Paulette (Lynn Whitfield), which is followed by a surprise engagement with Clint, and the expected resolution at the end. The rest of the time, we get little nuggets of wisdom about the relationship between the beauty industry and people of color, or an ongoing joke about how well-endowed Violet’s father Richard (Ernie Hudson) might be. It ends without much resolution, except that Clint is out of the picture, and she’s working on something with Will for the next film in the franchise. The message is definitely there and definitely clear: You do you, but know why you are doing you, and make sure it’s only you doing you and no one else. It just stumbles getting there, and never really seems to come together as well as I had hoped.
“Nappily Ever After” (2018) is a romantic dramedy taking a look at the relationship between black women and their hair, at the individual and the social level. It has troubles keeping things together throughout, but it ends up being all right in the end, even if a little heavy handed and rushing through some key scenes. Fans of romantic dramedies or personal growth stories will definitely enjoy this film, and may learn a few factoids along the way that will help folks reconsider all our beauty standards and choices, or at least making sure they are our own.
Rotten Tomatoes: NR
Metacritic: NR
One Movie Punch: 7.2/10
“Nappily Ever After” (2018) is rated TV-MA and is currently streaming on Netflix.
