The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
WORTH A LOOK
Easy to become invested in character study of ‘Selah and the Spades’
“Selah and the Spades” possesses qualities suggesting it is the work of a first-time feature filmmaker. ¶ Both good and bad. ¶ Written and directed by Tayarisha Poe, “Selah and the Spades” — landing on Prime Video this week after being acquired by Amazon at last year’s Sundance Film Festival — is intimate and lovely. Working with cinematographer Jomo Fray, Poe captures her lead characters with an unmistakable love. ¶ That likely stems from her approach developing them: She wrote one short story about the characters and their world — an elite boarding school — every day of November 2014; she then created multimedia works based on those stories. ¶ Unfortunately, telling one longer, engrossing story is where Poe, sadly, falls a little flat.
All that inside-out familiarity for the movie’s namesake, Selah Summers (Lovie Simone), and her new protege, Paloma (Celeste O’Connor), isn’t enough to make “Selah and the Spades” as compelling as you’d hope. This is a film with a fairly
significant momentum
problem and and ending that’s decidedly unremarkable. And, yet, it works just well enough as a character study — thanks in
part to the aforementioned young actresses — to consider giving it look.
Inspired by her own experiences at a boarding school, Poe gives us heightened, fictional look at life at one, The Haldwell School. There, five factions run a criminal underworld involving illegal drug and alcohol sales. Selah, a 17-year-old senior, sits atop the most powerful faction, The Spades.
As “Selah and the Spades” begins, she has a rival in Bobby (Ana Mulvoy Ten), leader of another faction, which bears her name. And while Selah has a trusted right-hand man in Maxxie (Jharre Jerome of “Moonlight”), she has no one to whom she feels she can hand over control of the Spades when she graduates.
Enter Paloma, an undergraduate transfer student who starts taking photos for the school newspaper. One of her first assignments brings her to the gymnasium where Selah and the rest of the spirit squad are practicing.
“They make the new kids take our photos ‘cause they don’t take us seriously,” Selah declares. “That’s a mistake the whole world makes — they never take girls seriously.”
(Though its main character, “Selah and the Spades” has other thoughtful and worthwhile things to say about the way the parents, teachers, boys and others treat young women, but that all gets a little undercut by the fact these particular young women are up to their ears in an illegal enterprise.)
Selah initially sees Paloma as someone to be used, borrowing her skills with a camera to get pictures of Bobby getting cozy with a boy on the grounds. Selah tells Paloma the photos are for a project in class called Modern Socialization in the Surveillance Era — “It’s like art-meets-social studies,” Selah explains — which is a clever bit of writing by Poe.
Increasingly, though, Selah seems to value Paloma, who, in turn, more and more worships her new older friend and is greatly influenced by her.
Has Selah found her successor or will the gradually more ambitious Paloma meet a similar fate to one suffered by a former Spade we hear about throughout the proceeding?
In crafting a story that feels like she’s borrowed a bit from 1988 dark teen classic “Heathers,” as well from writer-director Rian Johnson’s 2005 high school noir, “Brick,” Poe has offered something that cannot stand with those films. She cites gangster films as the inspiration for the fivefaction story element, and while she has the occasional youngster roughed up in the school’s north stairwell, “Selah and the Spades” just doesn’t click on that level.
Still, it’s pretty easy to become invested in Selah and Paloma, especially the former, with whom we spend the most time. At school, Selah is singularly focused and ruthless, but at home she can’t stand up to her mother (Gina Torres), whose vision for her daughter’s post-Haldwell life differs from Selah’s.
It would have been nice had Poe devoted more time to Paloma, especially away from Selah. That she did not hampers our ability to buy into the character’s metamorphosis. Paloma nonetheless is interesting, largely because the portrayal by O’Connor (“Irreplaceable You”) is interesting.
Poe asks more of Simone (“Greenleaf”), and the New York City native delivers a performance that, while bordering on being of the one-note variety, is impactful. .
Like her two young stars, Poe should prove to be worth watching in the years to come.
There’s enough to like about “Selah and the Spades” that it’s enticing to think about what she could do with a stronger story.