Being big, black, brilliant and 40
TITLE The Forty-Year-Old Version STREAMED BY Netflix
REVIEW BY Tevya Turok Shapiro
Sundance award-winning film The Forty-Year-Old Version is a new blackand-white film with about a thousand edgy things to say about blackness, hip-hop, selling out and getting old.
It’s written, directed and produced by and stars Radha Blank. It’s even loosely autobiographical – she plays a playwright who tries to break into hip-hop, also called Radha. Blank has poured her essence into the script and distilled it into a story you can relate to, yet it is still distinctive, told with style and spunk. It aired at Sundance earlier this year, where it won Blank the US Dramatic Competition Directing Award; now it has been released on Netflix.
The Forty-Year-Old Version is a hoot – the humour and social commentary are razor-sharp, but the start of Radha’s tale is pretty smothered by pity, as she tosses and turns restlessly in a dark apartment. This agitation is a defining feature of her life – the frustration of waiting and waiting to find rest, to catch a break – but the more you try to take it easy, the harder it gets. It’s an ageold struggle shared by billions around the world, the people who can only get themselves out of bed in the morning by brooding on the hope that maybe today will be the day that everything starts getting better.
Radha cannot help confront assumptions about blackness. As a playwright, she uses the term “poverty porn” to describe the tendency of producers to dismiss black stories as inauthentic if they aren’t seeping with sex and violence. In her life as hiphop artist RadhaMUS Prime (which is genuinely Blank’s stage name) she condemns factionalism in the black community based on superficial social constructs, and challenges the notion of cool.
Inspired by the likes of Woody Allen and Spike Lee, the whole is shot in black and white, exposing stark contrasting images that stick in your mind, and cultivating the dreamy bustling atmosphere of the gritty New York streets.
Blank has written for several successful television series including She’s Gotta Have It and Empire, but The FortyYear-Old Version is her directorial debut. Having veritably bared her soul, it’s hard to imagine how she might top herself in the future, but it would be a shame if she remains a one-hit wonder, now we’ve seen her chops.
She is a cinematic chameleon, able to handle just about any role in the filmmaking process, or all of them. Here’s to hoping we see more of her and more like her in the future.