starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Nate Parker, Minnie Driver, Danny Glover
This quote has long been attributed to "gonzo journalist" Hunter S. Thompson -- though, like much about the music business, the quote itself has been altered and adapted for various uses. Its adaptation makes it no less apt.
The music biz can be a great place for the lions to roam and roar but it takes a terrible toll on the lambs. I know. I spent a good part of my career writing about the public face of the music business, and two misbegotten years behind the record industry curtain, laboring deep in its boiler rooms. I was so out of place I was relieved to get back to the reporter role. There were many things going on that I would have preferred not to know about, and certainly the behaviors of those deemed to have power and the way in which women were fetishized and commoditized were among them.
I don't know what it's like to be on that side of the industry now, but I imagine it's not that much changed. For women, sex is either the trump card or the key to despair in most dealings. Either hike up your skirt and don't complain about being used, or use it to screw your way along whatever path you think it can take you. Beyond The Lights is partly about the soul-selling demands on female artists in contemporary music, but it also reminds us that it's a choice. There is a laundry list of contemporary female artists who said "no" to having their image, their music, their very bodies pimped out for mass consumption -- and most of them have faded into oblivion.
Beyond The Lights could be seen as a contemporary Captain Save-A-Hoe fairytale along the lines of The Bodyguard or even Mahogany, but that's just my romantic cynicism talking. Yes, it's a story we're not unfamiliar with, the Romeo & Juliet star-crossed lovers thing somehow never gets old, but told in a way that lets us linger a bit longer with our protagonists. "I see you," says policeman-with-a-heart Kazam Nicole to up-and-coming pop music siren Noni Jean, who, in a moment of existential angst, considers taking the easy way out from a balcony at the Sofitel in Beverly Hills. And Beyond The Lights allows us to "see" deeply into the characters: their motivations, their pressures, their desires, their pasts and the illusions they cling to make them seem more than just stereotypes.
A talented singer, English-born Noni's success has been orchestrated by her rigidly ambitious single mother Macy, played by the excellent Minnie Driver. But there is nothing that Macy won't do to advance Noni's career, from co-signing her daughter's half-naked appearances on screen to accepting and promoting a ready-made romance with a white rap star (played by Machine Gun Kelly).
Noni's life is heavily proscribed and she's on a short leash; director Gina Prince-Bythewood makes this patently clear by having Noni gussied up in stage gear that is both extremely revealing while simultaneously heavy on chains, buckles, shackles and restraint straps. Macy is holding the other end of the leash, and nowhere is that control more obvious than when she kneels before her daughter, undoing the endless buckles on a towering pair of torturous high heels Noni's been wearing. Our girl isn't free, and the weight of the chains are repressive enough for her to seek freedom in the well-muscled brown arms of her savior, Officer Nicole. As this goes against the well-laid plans of Mama Macy, whose life revolved around her daughter, complications ensue.
Groomed for a political career by his father (Danny Glover, his voice rapidly disappearing into unintelligible fog), a police captain, Kaz is an upstanding, goodhearted, boy scout soul who collects epigrams, pals around with a giant Rottweiler, tackles wife-abusers, doesn't maul on a first date, and maybe even rescues kittens out of trees (we know he rescues this little kitty from a balcony). He's even exceedingly kind to the audience; he treats us to numerous shots of his shirtless magnificence throughout. He's an old-fashioned leading man, a Prince Charming who only loses his cool and throws punches when women are being disrespected. But of course, Pops' plans for his son do not involve a violet-haired pop tart as a political first lady, and so he becomes the Montague to Noni's Capulets.
In 1994's Out Of Sight, on-the-run bank robber George Clooney tells improbable love interest, federal marshal Jennifer Lopez, that what they need is a "time out" to consummate their passion before the inevitable realities reassert themselves. When Noni faces a career crisis, complicated by Kaz's actions, the two take a memorable "time out" across the border, far from the lights of Tinsel Town. The disparity between Noni's on-stage persona and the natural woman she is, is astounding, and it's a transformation that Kaz has had a hand in.
Beyond The Lights has, in my estimation, some giant clumps of truth about the modern music industry and gives what feels like a real-time representation of how love connections can develop. And though the film may seem slow in segments, it's those lingering moments of chemistry between the marvelous Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Nate Parker that engulf the viewer in their saga and spin pure magic on the screen. Their pillow-lipped presences lend the romance a veneer of verisimilitude in a way that uplifts the tropes of the star-crossed lovers tale. I like the movie.
[At the same time, the film makes me think about the fetishizing of young actresses, particularly young black actresses on screen. Gugu is beautiful; in this film she appears half naked, we are staring at her crotch and nipples covered by thin strips of leather in one of her first scenes, she is manhandled (OK, romanced) by two different actors, and it seems that the camera has lingered on just about every inch of her body by the time the film is over. Halle Berry showed her breasts on screen in Monster's Ball and earned an Oscar; what's next for Gugu?]
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