Pariah (2011): the most influential 2010s film you haven’t seen (Review)

You don’t get anything if you don’t ask. This new Criterion UK Blu-Ray of Dee Rees’s debut film Pariah came from a request she made when the company met with her about a forthcoming release of her later film Mudbound. Rees suggested that Pariah would make more sense as part of the prestigious collection, and now they’re releasing both, with Mudbound scheduled for later this year.

I first heard about Pariah from American friends who raved about Rees’s writing and directing, as well as Adepero Oduye’s lead performance. I eagerly awaited its UK release, mindful that independent films can take their time crossing the Atlantic, particularly independent films with Black leads. (One of the other African-American films I remember gathering buzz around this time was Ryan Coogler’s debut Fruitvale Station, which came out in Britain a whole year after its US release) In the end, Pariah took a whole decade – this disc, which makes Rees the first Black lesbian film-maker to be honoured by Criterion, is unbelievably the first chance British audiences have had to legally see it. In between, Rees has worked with Anne Hathaway, Carey Mulligan and Ben Affleck, adapted Joan Didion and made a biopic of Bessie Smith, yet she says she still returns to Pariah as a kind of artistic lodestar, the distilled essence of what she got into film-making to do.

So what is she trying to do? The quick answer is representation, and this is Pariah‘s key selling point – it is a coming-of-age film about a Black lesbian, which even ten years later is a remarkably rare thing. The combination of this subject matter and the title, though, may lead to you being wrong-footed when the film begins in a lesbian bar in downtown New York. How much of a pariah can you be in such a modern, diverse environment? Quite a bit, as it turns out. Rather than being a straightforward story of overcoming prejudice, Pariah is a more complex work about traversing different worlds and not quite fitting in any of them. Oduye’s character has two names to match her double life; to her traditional parents (Kim Wayans and Charles Parnell) she’s Alike, but with her friends she prefers the more androgynous Lee.

At the club, Lee’s main problem is that she’s a wallflower. Her fear of being exposed as sheltered or inexperienced powers a lot of the movie’s most heartbreaking scenes but also its funniest, when her friend encourages her to try wearing a strap-on (“you couldn’t even find a brown one?”). At home, she has the exact opposite problem of being too clearly gay, although even this more familiar strand of the drama avoids being obvious. Lee’s mother Audrey struggles to impose conventional standards of femininity on her daughter even as she quietly chafes against the similar restrictions imposed on her by her husband Arthur. By contrast, Arthur likes to imagine himself as being more indulgent of his daughter, playfully asking her if she’s got a crush and implying he’d be tolerant of her going through a “phase” – wording that unwittingly signals to his daughter that his tolerance will stretch a little further than his wife’s, but not by much.

It’s a fabulously observed tightrope-walk, played beautifully by Parnell and a perfectly cast-against-type Wayans. No question, though, that the film belongs to Oduye. Best-known on film as Eliza, the woman separated from her children in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, her performance as Lee shows she can make simmering discontent as gripping as the howling anguish she unleashed in McQueen’s film.

Arthur, incidentally, is a policeman, a job that implies he may have to compartmentalise his life as much as Lee does. That story element would probably be examined in more detail if Pariah was made now, but it’s the only thing that shows its age. The cinematography is by Bradford Young, and the sheer modernity of its look shows how his signature style – dark shadows, saturated neon and colour gels, lots of attention paid to different skin tones – has defined Black cinema of the 2010s as much as any director. The movie’s unsung hero, though, might be composer Reema Major. As Rees notes in an interview included in the extras, she conceived the film as one where every character would have their own distinct musical taste, an ambition which would normally be completely out of the grasp of a low-budget film like this. But Major, who Rees recruited after happening on one of her concerts, makes the dream a reality with her musically fluent, wildly diverse genre pastiches. The extras in general are warm and full of appealing details, from a cast reunion to a peek at the “mood book” Rees assembled in pre-production.

THANKS FOR READING GRAHAM’S REVIEW OF PARIAH

This month’s Pop Screen exclusive sees us (big) suit up for what many people consider the greatest concert movie of all time – Talking Heads’s wildly inventive, Jonathan Demme-directed masterpiece Stop Making Sense. Graham is joined once again by Talking Heads superfan Ewan Gleadow to discuss the band’s career, the wild visual concepts and their possible meanings, the band’s excursions into unexpected genres, Chris Frantz’s moany autobiography and so much more. 

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