52 Films By Women: Suicide Kale (2016)

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By Andrea Thompson

Can be a groundbreaking and a little cliche at the same time? I’d say yes, because the indie film “Suicide Kale” embraces this inherent contradiction. Note that I say indie film, a label which has been somewhat co-opted by major studios, mostly as an excuse for an endless series of cutesy quirks which typically act as a sort of substitution for an actual plot. But “Suicide Kale” is very much an indie film, and was actually shot over the course of a few days at the home of one of the leads using natural light and equipment filmmakers already owned.

In other words? “Suicide Kale” was clearly a labor of love, and not just because it revolves around two couples, one five years married and other other a mere month into dating. The same old story? Most definitely. But cliches can also be something of a privilege only granted to a select few, and “Suicide Kale” is on one level about taking a story that has been almost exclusively set among straight white people and enacting it among queer women, three of four of whom are women of color. 

These women are also given all the depth and character they are seldom granted by straight filmmakers, and that this movie is even came to exist is due to close collaboration, both among the crew, most of whom were queer women, and the four lead actors, who also improvised additional dialogue. Nearly the entire film also takes place in the aforementioned donated home, director Carly Usdin’s wife is one of the film’s producers, and also takes on cinematography duties, doing a damn good job exploiting the natural beauty of Southern California to even greater perfection, and screenwriter Brittani Nichols also plays one of the leads. 

Nichols couldn’t be accused of lazy writing, since her character Jasmine and new girlfriend Penn (Lindsay Hicks) find themselves in a situation where there is no script when they head to the home of their married friends Billie (Jasika Nicole) and Jordan (Brianna Baker, also the house loaner) for a dinner party and discover a hidden suicide note. What’s a houseguest and friend to do? Head back into the kitchen and continue as usual? Certainly not talk openly and honestly about what they’ve found, as that would put something of a damper on the film’s comedic spirit. 

And “Suicide Kale” is very much a comedy, one that allows for plenty of darkness in a place so brightly bohemian and liberal that couples share their dog with another family out of fear of placing it in a toxic environment. Good gravy. 

Anyhow, anyone expecting the wit to flow long will be disappointed, as the dialogue has more in common with the stuff of mumblecore than your typical romcom. If the note’s author is a mystery, other things are clear enough, like the fact that ‘perfect couple’ Billie and Jordan are experiencing difficulties. Jasika Nicole is the film’s standout, revealing everything not through dialogue, which is unremarkable by choice, but through her tone, which becomes almost unbearably fraught whenever she’s alone with her wife, to her wide, fake smile as she casually reveals how her marriage has decayed. Your heart breaks for her, and for the complexity women like her are rarely allowed to portray on-screen.

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It’s revolutionary in its quiet way, as is (spoiler!) the lack of suicide in a film which not only consists of soley queer of characters, but is completely devoid of men. Bechdel test? Not needed here. If the film’s ending is also ambiguous, it packs more progress and general boldness in a mere 80 minutes than most films do in two hours, even managing to put the so-called healthy couple on ground that becomes nearly as shaky as the marriage which seems on the verge of shattering. Now that studios are supposedly hungry for diverse content, I’m hoping “Suicide Kale” isn’t a complete fluke, and that these kinds of stories will be told by a greater variety of people.

Suicide Kale is streaming on iTunes, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime, and Kanopy.

52 Films By Women: Represent (2020)

Music Box Films

By Andrea Thompson

“Represent” is an exception among the many political documentaries, which have become quite prolific recently. At their best, they tend to reveal unsettling truths, but not much food for thought, at least for the most part. There are exceptions of course, but that’s not entirely a bad thing. Our politics, which tended to comprise various shades of gray, haven’t so much polarized the way everyone believes. Rather, they’ve been stripped to reveal what we’ve become, and how we could deteriorate into something far worse if things continue to unravel.

But “Represent” doesn’t just show the common ground that exists between the various aspiring Midwestern politicians it follows, all of them women, it got me to do something I didn’t think was possible in our current climate: sympathize with a Republican running for office. The documentary could never have made me vote for her even if I could have, but I challenge the most ardent Democrat not to feel some compassion for Julie Cho, who decides to run for state representative in Evanston, a liberal suburb of Chicago.

Cho is certainly the most complex of the three women director Hillary Bachelder follows for her feature debut. Cho is in many ways the ultimate American success story - an immigrant who fled an oppressive country, in her case North Korea, and saw the best of America in the small town she and her family ended up in. Distrust of any state or national authority was already a given for Cho, who soon found herself drawn to the Republican party of the 80s, which advocated for small government.

It’s not that Bryn Bird and Myya Jones are less fascinating, they’re just on more predictable paths as Democrats. Bird is a farmer and happily married white mother of two small children who runs for township trustee in her small rural town of Granville, Ohio, and Jones is a 22-year-old Black woman who’s freshly graduated and decides to run for mayor of Detroit, then state representative when her mayoral bid fails.

Bachelder doesn’t need to do much to convey just how much gender plays into all three campaigns, or how much more Jones has to shoulder as a Black woman, a demographic which is the backbone of the Democratic voting block, but doesn’t seem to get much support once they decide to put themselves front and center. 

Not that Cho or Bird have it easy. Cho, who makes gerrymandering and the effect it has on suppressing minority votes the central issue of her platform, doesn’t just encounter open scorn, and even threats of violence when she goes out campaigning, but a complete lack of support from her own party. They become so bent on silencing her they pressure her to drop out, and in one case a top official outright hangs up on her during a phone call. There’s also numerous other macro and microaggressions, including some casual racism at a Republican luncheon.

Bird has her own issues. Her area is heavily Republican and never had a progressive candidate representing them. The trustee board also consists of a very entrenched old boys network who constantly undermine the only (also Republican) woman in the room, whom Bird is angling to replace. So Bird has an uphill fight of her own, even if she does manage to convince quite a few others to get involved in political campaigning for the first time.

Under such circumstances, it can often be difficult to not define subjects by their worst experiences, and Bachelder avoids this by revealing some of their biggest obstacles during the latter half of “Represent,” which include Cho’s past cancer diagnosis, Bird’s mother passing away, and Jones recouting her childhood sexual abuse.

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The fly-on-the-wall approach doesn’t always prove to be the best, given that some of the more minute aspects of their political journeys fall through the cracks. But it just might be a fitting angle for the mostly non-flashy style of campaigning all three candidates embrace. That Myya, who has all the characteristics of a political star on the rise, doesn’t overwhelm the others with her dynamic, intensely charismatic presence that’s a natural fit for the social media she embraces (and eventually includes a viral rap video), is especially impressive, reflecting Bachelder’s commitment to give equal weight to all of her subjects.

The doc is also curiously reluctant to embrace its influences. That “Represent,” which takes place over the course of 2017-8, was partially inspired by the influx of women in politics in 2016 is evident. But as the doc points out in its opening, there have been many cases when the number of female politicians have suddenly seemed to increase. If it’s treated as a lark each time, then the timing of the film’s release, which coincides with Biden’s pick of Kamala Harris as his VP, is impeccable. Who knows? Maybe the normalization of women in office could arrive sooner than any of us would have allowed.

52 Films By Women: And She Could Be Next (2020)

PBS.org

By Andrea Thompson

Watching the two part documentary series “And She Could Be Next” is an interesting experience, especially given the last film I watched that dealt with the state of our national politics. But where so many films about our election process tend to give in to the cynicism of a system that so often favors the white and wealthy, I’ve found people of color tend to take a different view, one that can’t afford to give in to despair.

In “And She Could Be Next,” which aired in two parts this week and follows various women of color running for office, what we see feels like a new coalition in the making, one that is electing women of color to the highest offices for the first time. And they’re actively supported by many young people who say they want to push back against the forces that are dehumanizing them. Many of them see volunteering, and especially voting, as an important component of the change they wish to see, a change to elect someone who could help enact that change. If many think it won’t make a difference, there’s enough pushback and voter suppression throughout “And She Could Be Next” to suggest that those in power disagree.

That pushback also happens to be a strategy of dehumanization that not only the various candidates, but the volunteers who work for them, speak of again and again. From the violent response via text on one campaign, to how canvassers of color are followed around in some neighborhoods they’re assigned, and how many immigrants are constantly questioned about their American identities, which culminates in the militarizing of the border and constant crackdowns on immigrants.

The truly frustrating, yet depressingly predictable thing is how little the women running are allowed to be angry, not just not just about the violent rhetoric they face in campaigns, but about the types of violence they experience in their lives. One of the most blatant examples is Lucy McBath, who discovered that her son’s education and solidly middle class upbringing was unable to shield him from gun violence, but there’s also Rashida Tlaib, who discovered her son felt he should hide that he was Muslim, and rising star Bushra Amiwala, a 19-year-old DePaul student running for Cook County Commissioner, who also discovered how much Islam is feared by many Americans. 

The real star though, is Stacey Abrams, and not just because she’s become known outside of the usual political junkie circles. It’s because what happened to her is appalling. She didn’t just run for governor in Georgia, a state which apparently has the most voter suppression laws in the country, she was up against Brian Kemp, who is so cartoonishly regressive his campaign ads are like SNL sketches of Republican messages. And we get to see how Abrams was robbed, on the ground, and in real time, even though she more than had the votes, the coalition, and all the volunteers at the polling locations to not only had out water and food to voters waiting for hours, but to ensure they had the right information in an election where that information changed at the last minute. 

And She Could Be Next

Abrams also calmly responded to Kemp’s various accusations even as he was responsible for all the obstacles and suppression her campaign was facing, as Kemp was also the chief elections officer, and someone who took pride in making it more difficult to get people to vote, or removing their votes entirely. Just as Abrams refuses to concede to a process that was so overtly rigged against her, “And She Could Be Next” isn’t much interested in giving fuel to the arguments against them, and the documentary is all the better for it. There’s no call to “understand” people trying to build the wall, who demonize a religion, and who advocate violent rhetoric. It merely calls for change, a message that is more needed than it should be.

The two part documentary is streaming for free here.