Something New

On Valentine's Day I went on an interracial date with my sweetie to see Sanaa Hamri's debut feature about interracial romance, Something New. Come to think of it, coming from a black/white background myself, I could have taken myself on that interracial date.

Now I usually avoid such 'race problem' films, filing them under "too close to home." (What am I saying? I always watch them, paranoid fashion, on DVD, just to make sure that the plot to eliminate the mulattoes has not advanced too far) But a trustworthy voice in my ear from Charlotte, NC persuaded me to give this a try, and as always, that voice was right on point. The movie is the best tearjerker I've seen since, well, O.K., since Brokeback Mountain. But before that, since ages. It is the anti-Jungle Fever, (Guess Who and Bringing Down the House don't even figure) and not just because its told from a women's perspective. I love me some Spike Lee, to be sure, but his dystopian vision of black/white romance always struck me as entirely far-fetched; more an ideological idee fixe than actual close observation of the way black people live and love. Lee, until recently, has often strung himself out on the "conscience of a people" trip, with uneven results (Bamboozled and Do the Right Thing: great. Jungle Fever and She Hate Me: toilet). Hamri is wisely post-agitprop, settling into what looks like a long groove of accessible, sophisticated observations of how we live now. What, like black people don't deserve that, too? Or does it have to be all feature-length comedy routines and Black History Month documentaries about our noble toil?

I keep hope alive for the trickle of great post-Spike Lee black movies like Charles Stone's Drumline to somehow turn into a stream, but what tends to keep flooding out of Hollywood is either Tyler Perry/Ice Cube-style chitlin' circuit films, or glass-ceiling shatterers like Tim Story's Fantastic Four, "cross-overs" that only prove that black directors can pasture the flock as sheepishly as white ones. Ms. Hamri is cut from a different mold. Her laserbeam dissection of the neuroses, melancholy, and quiet triumphs of the black bourgeoisie makes her film matter. This may sound over-the-top, but if Spike Lee was the black Orson Welles -- the maverick genius who proved it was possible -- I really think Hamri could be the black Woody Allen: the poet laureate of the comedy and ambiguity of "arrival" in American society.