Love & Basketball (2000): and a lot more besides (Review)

Auteurism isn’t very popular these days, even amongst auteurs. The current fashion seems to have swung back to a pre-1950s model of treating the studio as the defining creative voice of a film, which can be interesting – auteur theory itself originated in such an environment – but it comes with pitfalls. I’ve seen every kind of modern moviegoer from A24 fanboys to Marvel heads reject interesting films for not fitting their parent company’s brand, so it’s worth reminding people that there are other, more forgiving ways to read idiosyncratic movies. That’s what Criterion UK’s new Blu-Ray reissue of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s debut feature Love & Basketball offers.

Let’s deal with the main feature first. The quickest way to describe my feelings about Love & Basketball would be: loved the love, not so sure about the basketball. I had expected the title to be semi-ironic, but Prince-Bythewood really does view these things as equally important, and allots them roughly equivalent amounts of screen time. There are montages of period basketball matches that, for fans of the sport, must produce a Proustian rush, but whose charms were all but lost on me. But the film also has a dynamite lead couple in the shape of Omar Epps and Sanaa Lathan, and Prince-Bythewood’s direction occasionally managed to involve even a sports ignoramus like me in the on-court drama.

Like Spike Lee (credited as producer) she is unafraid to use her camera in a more forceful, expressionistic fashion than you may expect from a naturalistic drama. There’s a sporting injury that might produce sympathetic pain in the audience purely from the dolly movement. The film also benefits from an excellent supporting cast around Epps and Lathan. Alfre Woodard, a superb performer who has done one-scene cameos in everything from 12 Years a Slave to Captain America: Civil War, gets a properly meaty role as the mother of Lathan’s character, and Gabrielle Union plays her other daughter. As a student of romantic cinema, Prince-Bythewood knows any love story that covers more than two or three years of its characters’ lives needs to have its leads’ heads turned by less suitable partners at some point, and so Epps’s Quincy briefly ends up separated from Lathan’s Monica none other than Tyra Banks! (Insert your own “we weren’t rooting for you!” joke here)

So there’s a lot to enjoy here; I think its 125-minute run-time is a little indulgent, but people who like basketball may disagree, and every time my attention started to wander it was dragged back. Sometimes it was dragged back by the palpable chemistry of Epps and Lathan (who dated in real life for three years after filming), sometimes it was the soundtrack, which includes everyone you’d want on the soundtrack to a turn-of-the-millennium Black romance movie: Maxwell, Donell Jones, Raphael Saadiq, Meshell Ndegeocello. African-American cinema of the 1990s is normally viewed through the lens of the hood movies that kicked the decade off; there’ll be time to talk about that in December, when Criterion UK reissue Menace II Society. Love & Basketball suggests an alternate reading of the decade, bookended by Leslie Harris’s Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. and this, two fresh, colourful modern-day character studies which point the way forward to modern creators like Issa Rae, Eugene Ashe and Lena Waithe.

Waithe is interviewed about her love of the film as part of the massive extras package, in which Criterion take full advantage of the rare opportunity for them to reissue a film where all the major players are still alive and willing to discuss their work. Some of the features are about the film’s snapshot of basketball culture and fandom, and if that’s the thing, fill your boots. Most of them are newly created, and the ones that are ported over from previous releases – like Prince-Bythewood and Lathan’s raucous, deeply entertaining commentary – are worth preserving. There’s also deleted scenes, auditions, a featurette on the film’s editing, and this alone would be enough to recommend the disc.

There’s more, though. The most interesting part of the set is the two short films by Prince-Bythewood, both of which precede Love & Basketball, and both of which shine a fascinating light on her auteur personality. In a new introduction, she says she’s still proud of the films – 1991’s Stitches and 1997’s Progress – even though they’re more downbeat than her features. Making them, she says, persuaded her that she’d rather be creating positive, uplifting films. It’s a welcome shift, particularly after you see Progress, a punchy, well-constructed, deeply felt short whose central point – appearing to equate modern-day gangbangers with the KKK – could nevertheless be read as Clinton-era respectability politics at its worst. It’s a very judgmental film, and it is telling that its judgmental quality has dated more than the eternally-fresh feature it’s supporting.

Stitches is just as stuffed with things to argue about, but is technically and morally more impressive. One of those great half-hour shorts that all but screams the arrival of a future feature director, it follows a Black female stand-up comedian whose abusive family crash back into her life without warning. The first line of dialogue has its protagonist define herself as a tomboy, a character type who unites Prince-Bythewood’s work from Love & Basketball through her Netflix hit The Old Guard to her upcoming project The Woman King, about the all-female royal guard of the former Kingdom of Dahomey. It’s also her only real engagement with comedy, and even though the lead character’s stand-up is clearly the kind that masks real pain, it also made me laugh. It’s strange that Prince-Bythewood’s move towards more positive narratives has seen her move further and further away from humour, but there’s enough feel for it in Stitches to suggest she could make a really satisfying comedy at some point. That’s the value of watching films as expressions of their directors’ worldview: you appreciate what they’re doing in the film, and you also appreciate the other things they can do.

THANKS FOR READING GRAHAM’S REVIEW OF LOVE & BASKETBALL

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