For Colored Girls Review

By Gigi on Tuesday, 10 May 2011

So, I finally watched For Colored Girls.

A friend, whose crazy views I respect had purchased the DVD and was urging me to watch it because she said it was wonderful.

I had seen reviews for this movie. I had read articles that claimed Oprah didn't want Perry to do the movie and Shange was doubtful that Perry possessed the skill to pull this together. The stage play had won numerous awards and the beloved play and Choreopoetry was being taken in a different direction that people were not quite comfortable with.

So Ms. Friend and I popped some corn, got the blanket and turned down the lights to watch the movie.

Now I understand why people did not like For Colored Girls.

Human suffering is difficult to look at. When we see it, we prefer that it be dressed up, polished and made palatable (as one Rotten Tomatoes post put it) so that we can view it without being affected by it. It shames us, makes us look at ourselves in a different light, makes us wonder whether somewhere inside us cruelty like this is lying dormant waiting for the right moment to erupt.

This movie was not about men being bad, and the men were not really bad. They just had their own challenging personal issues that needed to be addressed. What many reviewers forgot was that these men were in pain themselves. But the movie was NOT about men. It was about colored girls and their stories. The character portrayals were different from the ones selected for the stage plays, but still very good.

I love good spoken word poetry - not the faint warblings I sometimes had to bear through at my local spoken word spot - but the deep soul searching words that echo my feelings, reconnecting me to the stranger seated next to me, entranced by the words that bind us together as human beings on this journey. So when the excellent actors lunged into it head on, I found myself caught up like the froth of the sea, taken across the vast experiences colored women have endured for centuries across the World

I applaud Mr. Perry for taking on subjects that affect black women, subjects that big movies poke lightly with sticks just to watch them ooze then turn away. He held it right up to our faces and forced us to smell it, made us touch it, made us so completely uncomfortable I had to turn away from the screen many times.

The actors did an exceptional job, pithy in their portrayals of the characters chosen to depict the characters in Shange's book. Even if my experience was not exactly the same theirs - rape, abortion, domestic abuse, betrayal, mental illness - their pain resonated with my own. The acknowledgement of the pain was all that mattered, that it is okay for a colored girl to say I hurt. I'm in pain.

Bravo.