As Oscar Wilde noted—all comparisons are odious. However in this instance it’s hard not to compare the all-Trini movie Between Friends, which made its Caribbean premiere last Tuesday night at the Central Bank Auditorium, with the recently released Jamaican (shot in Trinidad), Home Again.
Both are didactic socio-dramas, highlighting significant regional and global issues. While Home Again focused on the plight of deportees, Between Friends is concerned with young adults’ exploration of sex (platonic and otherwise, but strictly heterosexual), relationships and the unforeseen risks of unprotected sex, notably HIV.
Between Friends has already garnered awards and showcases at major diasporic film festivals both in North America and Africa, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s Aids awareness message directed at a young audience is probably worth a 100 public sexual health campaigns (particularly in the Caribbean and Africa, two regions which still unfortunately register far too high in Aids statistics). An attractive young cast, a contemporary soundtrack and some stunning cinematography, which brings the new Port-of-Spain cityscape to the screen for the first time along with the usual tropical tropes of Maracas and Mayaro beaches, all make for easy-on-the-eye viewing.
While kudos is due to both director Omari Jackson and The T&T Film Company for their joint venture, this review seeks to move beyond self-congratulation, and to assess the movie as a feature film, vying for screening space in world cinema. Engaged film which examines important social issues has been with us since the days of Eisenstein. Slumdogs and City of God are only two recent examples from the developing world which have captivated a world audience, largely because the messages they carry are subliminal or suggested rather than explicit. It’s the old story of showing rather than telling, what poet TS Eliot called the “objective correlative”.
In the two cited films, audiences are pulled into a human drama, carried by characters with an onscreen life of their own, apparently unhindered by directoral strings. We believe in these characters and care what happens to them and it’s only our engagement with their stories, rather than an idea however laudable, that we are drawn to reflect on the messages embedded in their stories.
There’s no disputing the attractiveness of the cast of Between Friends but within the confines of the script, none of them are able to escape from stereotype (married man cheating, young sexually irresponsible stud, undecided tease, naive virgin duped by exploitative older man, faithful best friend seeking more than a platonic relationship, odd girl out who resists peer pressure to have sex she’s not ready for). Apart from admiring their clothes or physiques, do we actually believe in or care about a group of privileged, over-protected youths angsting about the mechanics of sex, how to initiate or maintain control in relationships?
Much of the dialogue repeats clichés which don’t advance necessary audience empathy: “We’ve never spent the night together…I’m working late at the office…Why do you always come over for sex and just leave afterwards?...You men are all the same, anything to get a girl in bed and then you move on…You’re such a slut you ol’ ho etc.”
Despite the very best of intentions, Between Friends never really frees itself from its message(s) or allows the audience to come to their own conclusions, which creates an unnecessary tension between wanting to endorse the message, while trying to relate to characters who are at best two dimensional, in a script that wavers between socio drama and public sexual health sensitisation. At times it views as two separate projects, and narratives incongruously stitched together.
What starts out as a rites of passage, bildungsroman narrative shifts to Aids case-study, complete with clumsy indoctrination about prejudice—notably in the scenes where Denis the married cheat diagnosed as HIV positive is scorned by his co-workers. Director Jackson remarked at the premiere that the film had been “ a labour of love” and it may seem uncharitable to criticise a project aimed at informing and alerting vulnerable young people to the sometimes cruel risks of unprotected sex and exploitative relationships.
The cases of Maria, whose future as a law student is threatened by her one night stand with stud Jimani and Mia the 17-year-old fooled by married player Denis may be real and salutary, but if the main directoral objective was to alert young audiences to the risks of unsafe sex, how many of those watching the screen will relate to the lives of a group of young people living the life of the gated bourgeoisie? True there’s the obvious message that disease is no respecter of social class but as Mcluhan pointed out years ago—the medium is the message and unconvincing acting and a script which fails to move beyond stereotype and cliche cannot be redeemed by either good intentions or some exotic backdrops.