Pariah, 2011
Li (Adepero Oduye) is a high school student navigating complicated questions of gender identity and sexuality. Along with her pal Laura (Pernell Walker), Li flirts with women at a local strip club, before donning more feminine clothing to satisfy her religious, controlling mother, Audrey (Kim Wayans). But when Li meets the cute and confident Bina (Aasha Davis), she begins to get more assertive about following her own desires and needs.
This is a moving, nuanced portrait of a young person at a personal crossroads, slightly oversaturated with plot elements.
I have had this film on my watchlist for years, and I was delighted to finally check it out. Despite having been made over a decade ago, the struggles and bigotry portrayed in this film are still depressingly common and relevant today.
When a young person is contending with gender identity and questions of sexuality, there are three different layers they have to deal with: the external (society/strangers), the intimate (family/friends), and the internal (their own body/mind). This film is mainly focused on the family/friends piece, and that sets it apart from most films from the 2000s/2010s dealing with similar topics.
A painful reality that this movie betrays is that much of the violence and hatred that young queer people experience is at the hands of people they know, and often their own family. While we see that Li, as a visibly trans-masc person, is at higher risk for harassment and possible violence from bigoted strangers, it is only at the hands of her own family that she is physically harmed, and the hateful words cut so much deeper.
One of the hardest sequences to watch involves a blowout fight between Audrey and Li’s father, Arthur (Charles Parnell). Trying to pull on emotional leverage to punish Arthur for the time he spends away from the home, Audrey screams that Li is “turning into a man”, and then throws several slurs at her own daughter. Worst of all, she is positioning her own child’s identity as an illness resulting from her father’s neglect. If she just had better parenting, it’s implied, she wouldn’t be queer or trans.
The family dynamics in the film are very interesting. While Audrey is more aggressive in policing Li’s appearance and behavior, her father seems to mostly want to look the other way. At times, this gets into some pretty heavy denial on his part (he’s the character who trots out the old “going through a phase” line). Li has something of an ally in her little sister, Sharonda (Sahra Mellesse), who despite some sisterly bantering, does shield her sister a bit from their mother’s wrath.
The movie also does a very good job in evoking a very real sense of location and community. There are distinct sections of the neighborhood, and yet there are overlaps: Arthur investigates crimes in the area where Li goes to a gay bar; Li’s friend makes a delivery to a local liquor store where some of Arthur’s friends hang out.
Finally, I was delighted to see the film explore a hilarious truth: queer teens get to have a lot of sexy times at “sleepovers” because they are not as supervised. Some of my friends just had a conversation about how amazed they are that their parents let them have their girlfriends stay overnight with basically no supervision, despite the fact that they’d have never let a boyfriend even stay the night at all, much less in the same room.
My only real complaint with this one was that it seemed determined to put way too many subplots into the script. Li’s struggles with her family on their own make for plenty of drama, suspense, and plot. I liked the subplot about her romance with Bina, and how that unintentionally drives a wedge between Li and Laura. I didn’t necessarily mind a few glimpses at Laura’s life. Laura seems more together on the outside, but she has been exiled by her own family and is struggling to find a path for herself. But then the movie piles on scenes of Li’s mom at work, implications that Arthur is having an affair, and it starts to feel a little overful. I guess I appreciate that the movie doesn’t turn Audrey into a one-dimensional monster, but taking runtime to show us that she’s kind of awkward at work and feels left out didn’t really add much to the story for me. Likewise Arthur’s potential infidelity.
I’d also be interested to talk to a trans-masc person about the portrayal in this film. The movie frequently conflates being trans-masc with being a lesbian, but those are different things. I had mixed feelings about the movie and the characters equating being a lesbian with being “butch”. We get a few glimpses of femme lesbian women at the bar that Li and Laura frequent, but that’s it. At the same time, I appreciate that the movie didn’t take a time out to have characters give expository monologues about sexuality or gender identity. A poem Li writes about a butterfly’s metamorphosis is a nice glimpse into her thoughts. I just felt that the movie could have used more than that.
Very glad to have finally seen this one!
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to stillmellow for finishing.
Actually your movie was scheduled to be third from last, but pants dropped and JJ's nom is still up in the air.
