Spike Lee’s ‘She’s Gotta Have It’ gets the perfect update

WE needed Nola Darling in 2017. We just didn’t know it. Nola Darling is the protagonist of Spike Lee’s 1986 feature directorial debut She’s Gotta Have It, which starred Tracy Camilla Johns as a young Brooklyn woman who unabashedly maintains a rotating cast of suitors. The veteran director has brought Nola’s story into the present with a captivating 10-episode Netflix series that started streaming last week.

DeWanda Wise (pictured) is effervescent as Nola, a struggling artist and self-dubbed “sex-positive, polyamorous pansexual”. Her “loving bed” (adorned with an alarming number of candles) plays host to three very different men – the nurturing businessman Jamie Overstreet (Lyriq Bent), the narcissistic model/photographer Greer Childs (Cleo Anthony) and the basketball-obsessed bike messenger Mars Blackmon (Anthony Ramos).

The film version was shot in black-and-white, save for one scene, and on Netflix Lee quite literally expands Nola’s world into full colour. As in the film, the series explores the inherent complications of Nola’s unconventional sex life – and the way society reacts to a woman who dares to enjoy sex.

But over 10 episodes, we get to know Nola in new ways. There’s more emphasis on her art and we get more intimate portraits of the other people in her life: her friends Clorinda (Margot Bingham) and Shemekka (Chyna Layne), whose own story unfolds with an air of tragicomedy similar to Bamboozled, Lee’s underappreciated 2000 send-up of the entertainment industry.

Nola’s Fort Greene neighbourhood also helps make her story feel of-the-moment. Lee never lets us forget that this is gentrified Brooklyn, and we see the effects of a changing community on Nola and her artist parents. Lee, one of gentrification’s most outspoken critics, knows Brooklyn better than anyone.

She’s Gotta Have It is full of cheeky references to the director (who makes an amusing cameo) and his work. In one scene, Nola and Greer riff on Denzel Washington’s 1993 Oscar snub for Malcolm X, which Lee directed.

The series marks a feminist triumph for Lee, whose most recent feature film, Chiraq, faced criticism for (among other things) a premise that seemed to put unfair pressure on black women. Nola is as confident as she was in 1986, but she’s also vulnerable in a way that’s refreshing.

Lee also gives a welcome update to Opal Gilstrap, a lesbian with whom Nola experimented sexually in the film and whose character smacked of stereotype. Nola and Opal (Ilfenesh Hadera) share a deeper connection here, and their relationship has a profound impact on Nola’s growth. Incidentally, Lee has credited his wife, Tonya Lewis Lee, an executive producer on the series, with convincing him to adapt She’s Gotta Have It for television.

She’s Gotta Have It was shot on a shoestring budget, and clocks in at just over 84 minutes. The TV version has a lot more resources to pull from, and Lee uses them with gusto. And despite its whimsy, the series never loses sight of its intention: to tell Nola’s story in her own words. – The Washington Post