Category: cinema

A few years ago, I walked into a large central London bookstore to find a book I’d written, planning to sign a few copies before its imminent publication (as authors are often encouraged to do). The book was about money – as both title and jacket copy made abundantly clear – and yet the bookseller I approached to ask where I might find copies informed me he’d placed them in… race studies. When I challenged him on that categorisation, he grew defensive, while one of his colleagues standing nearby visibly cringed. Over time, I grew to see the encounter as so on the nose as to render it absurd, almost comical – a perfect allegory for how the book industry views Black writers and yet so ludicrous that I considered it anomalous. Imagine my surprise then, when reading Percival Everett’s novel Erasure a few months ago, only to find that exact scenario playing out beat for beat.

Everett is as prolific as his work is uncategorisable, the author of more than 30 books, including 2022’s Booker-shortlisted The Trees. His previous novels have included allegorical zombie horror and a sort of spy caper, while his forthcoming novel, James, is a retelling of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of enslaved Jim. Now Erasure, published in 2001 and widely regarded as one of his finest novels, has been adapted for the screen by journalist turned screenwriter Cord Jefferson. The result is American Fiction, a biting satire that takes aim at the publishing and media industry’s endless appetite for stereotypically “Black” narratives – or as one character bluntly states: “white publishers fiending Black trauma porn”.

It follows novelist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (played superbly by a grouchy but lovable Jeffrey Wright), who, frustrated by the publishing world’s elevation of stereotypical “hood lit” tropes over his own rather more high-minded literary efforts, decides in a Puckish moment of mischief to write a novel crammed with as many stereotypically “ghetto” tropes as possible. It is intended as parody, a middle finger to an industry that maddens him – but to his dismay, the ostensibly progressive white publishing world takes the novel at face value and he winds up with an astronomically large book advance. That Monk submitted the novel under a pseudonym only further complicates matters, and he is soon trapped between disgust at the publishing industry, at himself, and by the fact that he desperately needs the cash.

“One of the ways that white America chooses to receive work by Black artists is by focusing on the race of the creator,” Everett says when we speak about the reception his work often receives. “I would say that my addressing of race really has very little to do with that bogus category of race and more to do with the fact that I’m American – there is not a serious American novel that does not deal with race, and when race is not an issue in an American novel, that’s about race.” He describes the absence of Black people in the TV show Friends – set in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities – as “a commentary on how America would like to see itself”.

And though American Fiction looks set to be one of 2024’s buzziest movies, Erasure – experimental, deeply literary, often bleak – doesn’t immediately seem the most obvious material for screen adaptation, given current Hollywood appetites for big-budget IP blockbusters and easily franchise-able reboots. For Jefferson, however, the number of parallels between Erasure and his own experiences was compelling enough to prompt his first attempt at a feature-length screenplay. “Have you ever read a book that felt like it was written specifically for you?” he asks. “That’s how it felt when I read [Erasure].”

He is referring to Erasure’s professional themes, but also to its layered exploration of complicated family dynamics: sibling tensions, ailing parents, alienating father figures. “There was so much that related to my personal life that it just started to feel eerie after a while.” In fact, when Jefferson first began writing for TV nearly a decade ago, he felt the need to lay firm ground rules with his newly acquired reps, telling them: “If you only send me out for ‘Black’ shows, I will fire you. Because I’m sure that’s not how you treat your white clients – I’m sure you don’t just send [them] to things that fit their racial profile.” Having started his career as a journalist, he had grown tired of constantly being asked to cover what he referred to, in a viral 2014 essay, as “the racism beat”, and wanted to avoid a similar fate within television.

He needn’t have worried, going on to write for a list of TV shows – Succession, The Good Place, Masters of None – as prestigious as it is diverse (in the Latinate, rather than corporate, sense of the word). The decision to turn his hand to film with American Fiction came not long after an Emmy win in 2020 for his writing on HBO’s superhero drama Watchmen, and the result is an assured, polished movie that would be regarded as a home run for any film-maker, let alone a novice. Tender, caustically funny, subversive and smart, it boasts a formidable ensemble cast that includes Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Sterling K Brown and Erika Alexander, and makes entertaining drama out of a topic – race – we are accustomed to seeing treated as anything but.

It’s interesting that American Fiction’s version of Monk’s parody novel opts to stay faithful to the style of literature originally satirised by Erasure, given publishing appetites for that sort of hood lit (1996’s Push by Sapphire is a clear reference here) have largely waned in the 20-odd years since Everett’s novel was published. Still, given the literary establishment has moved on to equally restrictive modes of engagement with Black writers, frequently pressuring them to foreground their identities or racial trauma, that anachronism doesn’t particularly undercut the film’s message.

And American Fiction otherwise manages to capture the myriad anxieties and minor indignities of the writer’s life with hilarious accuracy: a misspelled name tag at a sparsely attended literary festival panel feels all too familiar; I recognise, too, Monk’s resentment towards the smug and (of course) undeserving anointed few who’ve chosen to “play the game”. In his case, that is the pandering Sintara Golden (played by Rae), who veers between slyly obsequious and cynically self-aware, and whose runaway bestseller We’s Lives in da Ghetto provides the template for Monk’s own ghetto fanfic.

In adapting Everett’s darkly funny text, Jefferson opts to amp up the comedy, and he informs the audience at a screening I attend that he wants them to laugh, specifically giving permission to the white people in the audience to laugh at his treatment of race. Why was that so important to him? “I remember going to see Amistad [Steven Spielberg’s 1997 historical drama of enslaved people] in the theatre with my family in Tucson, Arizona.” This is where Jefferson grew up, by his telling in an area with very few other Black or biracial people. “The theatre was nearly empty. And I enjoyed the movie, I thought it was good, but we left and I thought… ‘Are we the people who need to see this movie?’”

In his own movie, comedy is employed as a Trojan horse, allowing Jefferson to make serious points about race and how our culture metabolises it while avoiding being a scold. It’s a smart approach, one that lets American Fiction sidestep the white fatigue with race discourse I sensed creeping in almost immediately after the histrionic self-flagellation of 2020. Jefferson cites other race satires, including Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, as “spiritual predecessors” to his own. “I wanted this movie to feel welcoming. This is a conversation that I wanted a lot of people to participate in.”

But does that impulse mean American Fiction risks becoming the very thing it is satirising – that is, stories about Black people angled towards the white gaze and which portray the Black experience solely in relation to white people? Especially since 2020, a tendency I’ve observed within my own home turf of publishing and journalism is that the type of Black-authored work (the largely white) industry gatekeepers favour frequently puts racism – and therefore white people – at or close to its centre, even if only as obstacles to Black self-realisation.

Jefferson, too, seems conscious of this potential hazard, well aware that the white-saviour narratives long championed by Hollywood – enslaved people movies, or civil rights biopics – also often conversely provide absolution for white audiences, who can set themselves against the flagrant racism of, say, a Ku Klux Klan member burning a cross on a lawn, eliding the many subtler ways they themselves enact racism on a daily basis. As Monk’s literary agent observes early on: “White people think they want the truth but they don’t. They just want to feel absolved.”

“That was something I wanted to avoid,” Jefferson notes. “I didn’t want to make a movie ostensibly saying: ‘This is a movie about Black people’ and yet it centres whiteness in a very real way and shunts the Black characters to the side. It’s something that I thought about a lot.” Consequently, American Fiction is rich with irony and remains drolly self-aware throughout; at one point Monk drily remarks to the white editor who has acquired his book: “I’m sure white people on the Hamptons will delight in it.” It feels like a pointed commentary on how the movie of which he is unwittingly the star will itself be received, the snake-eating-its-tail nature of creating work that critiques white people in a post-George Floyd landscape.

American Fiction avoids that pitfall by broadening its scope far beyond the consequences of white liberal anxieties. Though much of the discourse around the film – much like the initial trailer released – has focused largely on its treatment of race, audiences may be surprised to find large parts of the film are a poignant study of a family in crisis, making clear that racism is not the defining pillar of Black identity. I imagine it has been strategically marketed thus, in the knowledge that white moviegoers may not be interested in a film they suspect is about something as quotidian as ordinary Black people experiencing quiet family drama – if indeed such a film would ever even be greenlit.

Monk’s relative privilege also allows for subtle commentary on intra-community class dynamics: a middle-class college professor, he is, alas, an incorrigible snob, and the depiction of low-income Black America he dreams up, one of “deadbeat dads, rappers, crack”, verges on the grotesque. It’s never clear how much of that is his own view and how much is him reflecting the culture’s prejudices back at it as part of his literary prank. Jefferson is clear, though, that this is not his own stance, pointing out that his film is not intended as criticism of the sort of Black art that Monk himself despises, so much as an effort to challenge its predominance.

“The first thing that Jeffrey [Wright] said when we met,” he says, “was: ‘I want to make sure that you don’t want to make some sort of respectability politics, “talented tenth”, Bill Cosby “pull up your pants” movie.’ It just made it even clearer that he was thinking about this film in the same way I was and that he was the exact person for Monk.” It’s a sentiment Everett echoes when discussing Erasure: “My contention was never that that kind of work is not art. My problem was that was the only thing available and it was viewed as representational of the African American experience, reducing it to one thing.”

Fresh off the megahit Pathaan, director Siddharth Anand is back with yet another star vehicle, this time pairing Indian superstars Hrithik Roshan and Deepika Padukone on screen for the first time. Aiming to valorise the tribulations and triumphs of the Indian air force, Fighter inevitably invites comparisons to the Top Gun franchise. The parallel extends to more than mere visual similarities: these films are all made with the approval and support of the military in their countries.

While the recent Top Gun update Maverick coyly constructs a faceless, stateless enemy, Fighter goes full throttle into an India v Pakistan showdown. Considering the current state of Hindi cinema, such hyper-nationalistic storytelling is to be expected, but the film offers little in terms of action pizazz. CGI-ed to death, the much-hyped scenes of aerial combat are flat, lifeless and utterly forgettable. Sentimental speeches of patriotic allegiance weigh down the love story between Roshan’s cocky squadron leader Patty and Padukone’s fiery fighter pilot Minni. Out of uniform their characters become so much more human that one wishes Roshan and Padukone could have just starred in a propaganda-free romance instead.

The need to wrap jingoism and commercial thrills into one neat package also results in one ludicrous sequence after another. Racy musical interludes – item songs – are haphazardly inserted throughout; at one point, a flight mission awkwardly cuts to an out-of-place daydream in which the two scantily clad stars groove to a sizzling tune in some distant seaside resort. Even when the camera gazes in awe at aircraft shooting through the sky, it dutifully pauses to take in roadside billboards on which ads for house paint are prominently displayed. Patriotism sells, but product placement pays the bills, too.

Film star Anne Hathaway reportedly walked out of a photoshoot in New York on Tuesday for Vanity Fair in a show of solidarity with striking workers for the magazine’s publisher, Condé Nast.

The actor had been prepared with makeup and hair styling but had not begun posing for pictures when word reached her that media workers were taking part in a 24-hour work stoppage amid union-corporation negotiations, Variety magazine was first to report on Tuesday.

About 400 workers who are union members at Condé Nast and working for titles including Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ and others had downed pens in a protest at the way the publisher is negotiating over layoffs.

Hathaway was on the premises for a photoshoot on Tuesday morning.

“They hadn’t even started taking photos yet,” Variety magazine reported an unnamed source telling the outlet, adding: “Once Anne was made aware of what was going on, she just got up from hair and makeup and left.”

The Guardian has reached out to Condé Nast and representatives of Hathaway for comment.

Workers walked off the job in the morning around the time the Oscar nominations were announced, Variety further reported, and held a rally outside the company’s offices in Manhattan.

The union posted on X, formerly Twitter, saying: “Thank you Anne Hathaway for not crossing our picket line.”

Stories of estranged family members finding their way back to each other have long been a reliable Sundance staple, a stacked subgenre in itself and one that can grow a little wearying as a result. Artist-turned-film-maker Titus Kaphar’s debut Exhibiting Forgiveness, showing in the main dramatic competition here, may not exactly revolutionise the form but he finds an authentic and sensitive way through, distinguishing his film from the flurry of other superficially similar stories.

It’s art as therapy for Kaphar, grappling with a strained relationship with his own father, based on a recorded conversation they once had after 15 years of no contact. Working through one’s own strife as a form of autofiction can often lead to self-indulgence but Kaphar has crafted something that deserves to exist outside of his inner circle, an emotionally wrenching drama set to resonate with those who have also had to confront the complicated equation of radical forgiveness.

How much is too much to take and when does carrying so much resentment start to hurt you more? They’re questions that have been buried by painter Tarrell (André Holland), with a sleekly curated life far from his conflicted upbringing, the light of his devoted mother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) muddied by the dark of his abusive father La’Ron (theatre actor John Earl Jelks). But there’s something eating away at him, night terrors that won’t go away, and when he travels home with his wife (a radiant Andra Day) and young son to help his mother move house, the re-emergence of his father causes a difficult reckoning.

There are troubling questions that Kaphar refuses to provide pat answers for, how one comes to terms with the good things a bad parent might be partly responsible for and how you learn to silence the worst parts of them echoing in your head, if that’s ever truly possible. Flashbacks are admirably limited, mostly focused on one day where we see La’Ron cruelly instill a sense of extreme work ethic in a young Tarrell, a layer of steel he insists is vital in a world that will demand it. How much does Tarrell then credit the strength of his meteoric career to him? How much of that hardness can be justified by the upbringing his father received as a child? Kaphar allows difficult moments to linger as Tarrell voices his anxieties, worrying that he’ll never be able to find his way through this arduous emotional maze. There’s also an effectively angry throughline about the hypocrisy of religion, Tarrell fatigued at how it’s shamelessly used to imply goodness when behaviour suggests otherwise.

Holland wears all of this turbulence in his face, a rage forever simmering, rage that he knows has come directly from his father, a darker part of himself that he’s far quicker in crediting. He’s dynamite here, the kind of dream in-every-scene showcase he’s never really been allowed on screen before, and there are enough electrifying moments, battling with his mother over her maddening enduring love for his father and a final explosion of emotion, to push Holland into both next year’s Oscar race and into a newer, long-deserved category of more prestigious leading roles. As his parents, Ellis-Taylor and Jelks are both superb, intimate arguments with them acted with such rawness, it feels like we’re watching them on stage.

As a first-time director with a background in visual art, Kaphar makes for a refreshingly restrained film-maker, keeping visual gimmicky at bay and involving his real paintings only when the film requires. He understands the importance of using one’s art as a way to untangle the knots of a troubled upbringing but avoids any form of pretentious overstatement. The work speaks for itself without him speaking for it. As writer, Kaphar makes a few more missteps along the way, a slight overstack of melodrama near the end, some rather crudely cartoonish art world stereotypes and some lines that are a tad ungainly (“Some things can’t be worked out on a canvas” – groan). These broad strokes only act as temporary distraction with a heart-grabbing finale that brings together all emotional threads while denying us the cliched hugged out happy ending we’ve learned to expect. Kaphar knows that forgiveness is harder than that and his film refuses to make things easy.

Crazy was most famously sung by Patsy Cline but written by Willie Nelson. I Will Always Love You was most famously sung by Whitney Houston but written by Dolly Parton. Ring of Fire, a love song reeking of sulphur and damnation, took off when Johnny Cash sang it on his 1963 album Ring of Fire: The Best of Johnny Cash.

But it was written by his wife, June Carter Cash, a singer, songwriter, musician, actor and author who spent much of her career in his shadow. “I feel aggrieved on her behalf,” says Kristen Vaurio, 46, director of a new documentary, June, which shines a light on one of music’s hidden figures.

“There are a lot of people who are like, oh no, she couldn’t have written that. This is a hard sell in Nashville but I feel like it’s the most recognisable country song there is in the world. I think because she was a woman, people didn’t want to let her have it.”

Vaurio’s film contains previously unseen archival material and interviews with family and friends as well as Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Kacey Musgraves and Reese Witherspoon (who won an Oscar for her role as Carter Cash in the 2005 film Walk the Line). It offers a reassessment of the legacy of a woman who received less recognition as a pioneer than Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette and still does not have a place in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

June Carter was born in Maces Spring, Virginia, in 1929, and was at the microphone by the age of 10. Her mother, Maybelle Carter, had a family music act with her cousin Sara Carter and Sara’s husband, AP Carter. They made some of the first country music recordings.

Speaking from Los Angeles, Vaurio says: “She came from Poor Valley at the base of Clinch Mountain, Maces Spring, and that place was always a very spiritual home for her. She spent so much of her life on the road, but having that place as home and those songs that she sang, and those Carter family songs, are very much rooted in that place.”

The family act broke up but mother and daughters June, Helen and Anita continued as Mother Maybelle & the Carter Sisters, with June playing autoharp and singing comic numbers with an exaggerated hillbilly accent and a wide toothy grin. From 1939 the sisters starred in a radio show on XERA in Del Rio, Texas, that reached far across America and Canada. They went on to become staples of the Grand Ole Opry country music show in Nashville.

Vaurio continues: “She came from – still to this day – a family of remarkable women. I don’t think that there’s another group of women like that – geniuses, business geniuses – and they just did it. Even though it was hard, they made it work.”

June’s effort to have a solo career ran into attitudes of the day in which a woman in a travelling show was referred to as a “girl singer”. Vaurio adds: “They also weren’t wanting to sign women to recording contracts because they didn’t think that women would sell. She was fighting against that.

“Everybody exists in their time and place and that was the time and place that she was in. She was in Nashville and trying to make it on her own in the 50s. She probably wouldn’t have called herself a feminist but she lived it.”

June and country singer Carl Smith became the “it” couple of their day at the Grand Ole Opry. But their marriage ended in divorce just four years later – a scandal at that time. Their daughter, Carlene Carter, recalls in the film that Smith claimed years later June never loved him, only the idea of him.

Carlene, one of the executive producers of the new documentary, says in a Zoom interview from Nashville: “I was so small when they split up, I have very few memories of them even hanging out in the same room together. Not that they didn’t like each other.

“There was a lot of hurt there for mom for a lot of years but she never talk bad about my daddy. They had a chemistry that was undeniable in their working career and they fit well in that regard. He wanted a different life than she did. He always said country music afforded him the luxury to be what he wanted to be, which was a cowboy.”

The Carters toured with Elvis Presley in the 1950s. Carlene, 68, often asked her mother whether she slept with Elvis but June would blush, giggle and deny it. “She always said Elvis was a nice young man and he had a good heart and she said he was so talented and was tormented – the usual thing that superstars end up having, that drives them in some way.

“But they were great friends. and he wasn’t past coming to our house when I was a baby and wanting a sandwich and nobody would be in there except the nanny and me, and we’d be asleep, and Elvis would be downstairs making a sandwich – probably peanut butter and bacon.”

June moved to New York in the late 1950s to study acting at the suggestion of the director Elia Kazan, who had seen her perform while scouting Tennessee for film locations. She married Edwin “Rip” Nix, a former football player and police officer, in 1957. They had a daughter, Rosie Nix Adams, but divorced in 1966.

In 1961 the Carters went on the road with Johnny Cash. Helen and Anita stepped away to raise families but June stayed on. When Cash spiralled into a drug addition and onstage outbursts, June intervened, hunting down his pills and throwing them away. She helped him find counselling and urged her daughters to pray for him.

In his autobiography, Cash described how June stuck with him through years of substance abuse. He wrote: “June said she knew me – knew the kernel of me, deep inside, beneath the drugs and deceit and despair and anger and selfishness, and knew my loneliness. She said she could help me ... If she found my pills, she flushed them down the toilet. And find them she did; she searched for them, relentlessly.”

June wrote Ring of Fire about falling in love with Cash despite his self-destructive behaviour. Carlene witnessed its creation. “I can remember when she was working on that song and then she played it with the autoharp and then tried the guitar,” she recalls.

“She made intricate notes about stuff and she ended up having a party one day with some friends and [singer and songwriter] Merle Kilgore was there, and he had been encouraging her with the song. She played it to him and he helped spur her along with it a little bit. But she wrote it and I remember running through the house and going to all Mom’s friends, ‘My momma’s written a new song!’ But we didn’t know it was a hit yet. We just thought it was going to be a hit.”

Cash recorded the song, officially credited to June and Kilgore, and it topped the US country chart in 1963. Carlene, herself a country singer and songwriter, comments: “Maybe people just look down their nose at her. ‘A woman can’t write a song like that.’ Well, wanna bet? Heartbreak Hotel – Mae Boren Axton, she sure did. There’s a lot of great women songwriters and Maybelle and Sara and the Carters, writing songs was the absolute foundation of the music of all of it for them.

“The big piece of advice that Mommy gave me was that there are no rules. You’ll know it’s a good one when you get it. ‘If you can just write one simple little song like the one I did for Johnny Cash, Ring of Fire” – she bursts into laughter – “I know she probably had her tongue in her cheek a little bit when she’s saying that to me.

“But she was dead serious, she’d look me right in the eye and tell me things like that, and I listened to her. She also was my biggest fan. She followed me all over the place and was always lifting me up and telling everybody about me. She was proud of her kids and proud that we were going to carry on in whatever way we did. That was important to them to carry on the music.”

In 1961 June turned down an offer to work on a variety show, agreeing instead to tour with Cash for $500 a week. Having both divorced in 1966, they got married two years later after he proposed to her on stage in London, Ontario, Canada. They had a son, John Carter Cash, in 1970.

Carlene says: “June was John’s absolute thing ever on the planet. She’d walk in a room and he would light up. He missed her; he called me and said, ‘Where are you and your momma at?’ I’d say, ‘Oh, we’re in shopping’ and he’d be like, ‘When’s she coming home? I just want to see June Carter.’

“It was very sweet and they were very much in love and my sister and I got to see what that looked like, for my mom to actually be in love with somebody that adored her and that she adored, and they had great mutual respect for each other. Everybody knows it was not easy all the time – definitely not – but for us girls, and for my little brother when he came along, we saw it on a daily basis between them. There were a few hiccups but that’s normal.”

June performed with Cash on record and on stage with songs including Jackson and If I Were a Carpenter, which won Grammy awards in 1967 and 1970, respectively. Among their duets were It Ain’t Me Babe in 1964 and If I Had a Hammer in 1972. In later years they often appeared with the evangelist Billy Graham. Cash’s addiction demons resurfaced, putting strains on the marriage until he went into rehab.

June’s occasional acting roles included the part of Robert Duvall’s mother in the 1997 film The Apostle. In 1999 she released an acoustic album, Press On, her first in a quarter-century, following her career from its beginning through her then 31-year marriage and collaboration with Cash. Archival footage of the making of Press On forms the spine of the Paramount+ documentary.

Carlene recalls: “One of the hardest things for June in the end was that she had never not been on the road. She had always been an entertainer and done it so the fact that she came back and made a record and went out and played some shows and got recognition and won a couple of Grammys in her 70s is hope for all of us women. I was so proud of her.”

When June died in 2003, of complications from heart surgery at the age of 73 with Cash at her bedside, obituaries produced by the Associated Press, Guardian, New York Times and others all mentioned her more famous husband in the first paragraph. But Vaurio hopes her film will disrupt that narrative.

She says: “I want nobody to ever say June Carter Cash and then say who, Johnny’s wife? I want her to be known as her own artist. She went out burning and that to me is such an inspiration and that’s a great lesson that anybody can take from this.”

Carlene adds she hopes the documentary will convey “the absolute total awesomeness of my mother, the whole package, flaws and diamonds. All of it is just so interesting and never dull moment, y’all.”