[English Review] "Dancehall Queen"
t/n : this review was first published in French on myinsaeng.com on August 7th 2016.
In my younger days, which seem more and more distant to me, I danced on the song “Dancehall Queen” and I could only screamed the "yeeaah aaaah", the "dynamite" because these were the only words I understood apart from the words dancehall queen. I had no idea it was the lead song of the original movie soundtrack. Since I'm in my Jamaican journey, this will be my movie review for August.
Before going any further, there is a trigger warning on the theme of rape on a minor.
Directed by: Rick Elgood, Don Letts
Release year: 1997
Plot: Marcia Green (Audrey Reid) is a single mom and street vendor barely scraping by even with a financial assist from the seemingly avuncular Larry (Carl Davis), a gun-toting strongman with a twisted desire for Marcia's teenage daughter Tanya (Cherine Anderson) who he then decides to pursue. Complicating things is Priest (Paul Campbell), a murderous hoodlum who killed Marcia's friend and now is terrorizing the defenseless woman. Facing three big problems (Larry, Priest, and without money), Marcia arrives at an inspired solution: develop an alter ego, a dancing celebrity called the Mystery Lady who can compete in a cash-prize contest and put both of the men against one another.
Effective lokalisation ?
As I said before for "The Real Jamaican Girls", I’m really not familiar with Jamaican patois, so watching this full-length film with no subtitle required my full attention. So although I may not have understood every line, you cannot say this story doesn’t take place in Jamaica. I was expecting some kind of okay cinematography. At best amateur pro, at worst home-made video vibe. I had to squash my own prejudices. The staging is never chaotic while the camera manages to capture the poverty of the environment without falling into pathos. The bright colors, even the way of dealing with darkness, are reminiscent of the technique used in dancehall clips of the 1990s, which is understandable since Rick Elgood is a renowned editor. I'm not Jamaican so I don't know where realism begins and ends, but this representation of the Jamaican working-class in “Dancehall Queen” remains within the aesthetics of the dancehall world while putting the dancers in the spotlight. For once.
To talk more specifically about the script, I had a hard time sorting out the contradictory feelings this film gave me. The emotional rollercoaster made me go back and forth between the scenes where we saw Marcia the boss lady and Marcia the lost mother... So I'm going to talk mainly about the mother-daughter relationship, which offers a double facet of the Afro-Caribbean woman rarely represented in cinema.
Mother but no Superwoman
Objectively speaking, this film is meant to be "the underdog always wins in the end" kind of film, but I found it depressing if you think about the portrait of the female condition that this film draws. Raising not only her two children but also her little brother, Marcia is the potomitan [t/n: “pillar woman”] of her family, with the difference that she isn’t the kind of authoritarian woman who is in total control of the situation. Quite the contrary. She struggles to survive, does everything she can but it isn’t enough. Her character is entangled in a fatalist fate linked to the very fact that she is a woman. Everything that happens to her, notably the fact that she is harassed but not killed, the fact that she gets away with being a dancer and not a singer for example, is because she is a woman. A woman whose life revolves solely around her children.
Her love for her children is never questioned, but her limited means of providing them with a minimum of material comfort pushes her to make certain decisions that put them at risk... Like encouraging her own teenage daughter to sleep with Larry when Tanya has already refused him and told her mother she doesn't want to do it. It wasn't so much the fact that Marcia quietly accepts to pimp her daughter that threw me off. It was the lack of agency she expressed out loud about the fact that they had no other solution, as if it were a fatality from which they couldn't escape. So is it because I watched the film with my lens of 2016, where this subject seems more sensitive than in the 1990s, or is it because of this ordinary representation of Black women that are always associated with emotionless sexuality, with mandatory violent sexuality without dwelling on the psychological repercussions of rape? I don't have the answer. It’s probably a bit of both. Besides, I use the word "rape", but it isn’t considered as such in the film, which gave me the impression that Tanya was considered as a woman ready to have an active sex life just because she is experiencing her first crush at the same time. The screenplay is more interested in the impact the act has on Marcia than the impact it had on Tanya, who is the first one concerned in this matter. In the second part, the screenplay therefore leaves aside Marcia and Tanya's relationship and focuses on Marcia's transformation as she decides to get rid of her stalkers. Marcia's role as a mother is defined by a failing "potomitance". In some ways, Tanya appears more mature than Marcia, as if they had reversed the roles because Marcia has done everything possible to ensure that Tanya does not follow the same path as she did, i.e. a teen mom without a degree working in the street, which brings me to the question: what kind of life can a young Caribbean girl dream of?
Still a girl but already a woman
Becoming a dancehall queen is the only way Marcia finds to make money quickly. The teenager she was, apart from becoming a mom at a young age, doesn't exist. After the competition, once everyone finds out who she is, certainly she has won, she will certainly still be able to compete in dance competitions. Is that enough to ensure a future for her whole family without Larry? The film stops at the end of her transition to become a full-fledged adult and take charge of herself. She was the woman who was still a girl.
To be an astronaut? To be an athlete? To be an artist ? To be an entrepreneur ? In “Annie John” (1985), Jamaica Kincaid recounts the childhood and adolescence of a young West Indian girl living on the island of Antigua. Thanks to her quick-witted spirit, she enters a good school, gets a good education and, when she turns 17 years old, she finally leaves the island for a future announced as bright. In the process, she goes through a period of depression taking her away from her mother and her best friend. As her level of education increases, she becomes more isolated. I'm no expert, but I believe that this image of the teenage girl as a victim of her own intelligence, which creates a shift with her environment, is recurrent among Afrocaribbean writers. Even though Marcia from “Dancehall Queen” wants her daughter to have another future, Tanya also finds herself confronted with dilemmas imposed by her social and feminine condition. She is the daughter who is already a woman.
Some English reports analyze the fact that Western society denies Black children the innocence that their age confers to non-Black children. For girls, and it is less talked about, this is mainly seen in their hypersexualization. The character of Tanya is fairly representative of the difficulty for a young Afro-Caribbean girl to be just a teenager. She is neither a Lolita nor a girl with the down-to-earth preoccupations of teenagers her age. She is torn between her desire to have fun, to experience her first love feelings with a boyfriend her own age, and the obligation to be a woman, sometimes taking on adult responsibilities, including meeting Larry's sexual needs. Thus, while doing what her condition dictates, she claims her right to agency over her own body and her right to make her own choices. This possibility of verbalizing what she wants was given to her by her mother's sacrifices to go to school and dream of a better future. Tanya's story was not the subject of the film, but her character only carries weight in the plot in relation to her dispossessed sexuality. Her virginity is an issue only for adults.
When I see the tagline "Dancehall Queen is a modern-day Cinderella story, with no Prince Charming, but one very strong woman", the reference to Cinderella leaves me skeptical (especially if you take away the fairy godmother who let her suffer all her teenage years, what does Cinderella do except lose her shoe?) Indeed, there is no Prince Charming, but Marcia's social condition doesn't change radically at the end of the story. It is debatable whether she is a "strong woman" because she doesn't directly get rid of her stalkers but pits them against each other to kill each other... But for me, what makes her strong is the fact that dancing allows her to control her body as she sees fit and, by extension, to control men. The dancehall queens in the film usually dances alone and, in their lives in broad daylight where no one recognizes them without their wigs and flashy outfits, they enjoy a certain independence under the eyes of men. I know that there is the argument: "they dance for the pleasure of the man", "they are maintained". Again, we cannot discuss this without discussing the life options given to Afro-Caribbean women? That’s another debate for another day.
Before being a mother, a woman was a child and then a teenager, I hope that more films will be produced to take an in-depth look at the staging of the coming-of-age process with Afro-Caribbean women without limiting their stories to their sexuality.