On Netflix the first film by actress and director Rebecca Hall, a delicate black and white story with a well-chosen soundtrack
In the 1920s there were some women in the good black bourgeoisie who tried to hide their black identity, passing themselves off as white. There is a beautiful film on this subject hidden in the folds of Netflix, “Two women” (“Passing”) the first film of the actress and director Rebecca Hall, daughter of the well-known English Scespirian director Peter Hall who was inspired by a 1929 book by Nella Larsen, the best exponent of the Harlem Renaissance. And there is also, on the subject, a beautiful book by Alexandra Lapierre entitled “Belle Greene” (ed. And / or) about a woman, daughter of an activist, who becomes the director of the fabulous library of a tycoon, hiding from Racist America of the turn of the century its descent from former Southern slaves (a problem that also affected the director’s maternal grandfather).
Even in the film, fierce and no frills, in black and white, the story is similar: two friends, Irene and Clare, meet in an elegant tea room in New York, as if they were in a Woody Allen film, they have not seen each other since school: an admittedly black lady, well dressed , crosses the fate of the old friend who passes herself off as white because she is a fair-skinned African American and is married to a racist of the worst kind. Naturally the two destinies cross: Irene has married a black doctor and lives her condition in the privileges of a middle class, she is in Harlem and actively takes care of the condition of the Afro-American community, organizing charity parties and balls. Clare has dyed blond and pretends to have the false identity of a white, also to please the racism of her banker husband, but it is inevitable that the meeting with the old friend, at first recalcitrant and then rightly jealous of her husband, provokes at the end a repressed sense of guilt and finally under the ashes of a satisfied bourgeoisie hatches a tragedy.
The film keeps the facts in the 1920s, as the book tells them and the black and white helps the psychosomatic dimension of the period, full of comedies and female supremacy. Rich in expressiveness thanks to two irreplaceable and extremely measured actresses in the lurking melò (Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga), the film focuses on the faces of the two protagonists and builds the atmosphere of the period around them, with a beautiful musical choice. The intimate drama also leads us to explore the unexpressed, while a random event, a sliding door, delves into women’s past and decides their future by digging into their minds, one is explosive and seductive and the other intimist and taciturn. In two days the story unfolds and we hope that at least for Ruth Negga, the Ethiopian Irish actress who pretends to be another race, an Oscar nomination is ready. In the meantime, enjoy a beautiful story of the roaring years of New York and the delicacy but also the precision of the touch of an already classy neo director.
November 17, 2021 (change November 17, 2021 | 12:11)
© Time.News