Pariah

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Adepero Oduye as Alike in Dee Rees's Pariah
Dee Rees’s debut feature film is a terrific studyof a teenaged girl who identifies as a lesbian, even though she lives under theheterosexual enforcement of an unhappy mother and a warm but philanderingfather.
Rees’s semi-autobiographicalfilm does a beautiful job of narrating the double-life of Alike (AdeperoOduye), a very smart high school senior who dresses as a conventional girlunder her mother’s disciplining eye, but then changes in the bathroom as soonas she arrives at school into the t-shirt and sideways-worn ball cap of thebutch lesbian she knows herself to be.
Pariahis a family study and a coming of age film that illustrates the shifting moresof a particular slice of mostly middle-class African American life.  Alike’s sister and her high school peers, forinstance, are indifferent to or intrigued by her gender performance, but thoseof her parents’ generation eye her with antipathy and suspicion.
Her mother, Audrey (beautifully played by KimWayans), frantically tries to enforce Alike’s waning heterosexuality, buyingher a deep magenta sweater with ruffles down the front that couldn’t be furtherfrom her daughter’s self-presentation.
Alike in feminine drag with her sister Sharonda (Sahra Mellesse)
When a dyke club opens across from a bodega thatArthur (Charles Parnell), Alike’s father, frequents, the male customers eye thewomen who stop by the store with hostility. One calls out a young woman, who listens to his disparaging remarks andthen casually insults him right back, much to the amusement of Alike’s fatherand his friends.
Although the scene istense, and pregnant with the possibility for gendered violence, the young dykesaunters out of the store with the upper hand. The tide of public opinion, Rees suggests, is turning.
Alike’s sister, Sharonda (Sahra Mellesse), teasesher older sibling mercilessly.  But whenshe crawls into Alike’s bed one night for comforting, as they both listen totheir parents’ incessant nighttime quarreling, Sharonda whispers, “You know Idon’t care, right?”  She isn’t specific,but they both know that Sharonda is talking about Alike’s sexuality.
In one of the film’s funniest scenes, Sharonda burstsinto Alike’s room when Alike and her best friend, Laura (Pernell Walker), arefitting Alike with a large white dildo and harness.  But Sharonda is unfazed and promises not totattle.  This younger generation makescommon cause along a set of new sexual mores—Sharonda is eager to haveheterosexual sex—against parents who cling to an older notion of sexual andgendered morality.
Much to its credit, Pariah is a coming of age story, rather than a coming out story.  When Rees first introduces us to Alike, she’salready very clear about her identity, though she’s yet to have sex.  Much of the film details her flirtations withother women, including her devastation at the hands of coldhearted Bina (AashaDavis), a straight young woman who befriends and seduces her, only to dismiss Alikethe morning after.
But Alike’s certaintyabout who she is—and that “God doesn’t make mistakes,” as Audrey claims and Alikeagrees, but from diametrically opposed perspectives—drives her toward her ownliberation.
Still, Rees details with compassion the enormouscosts that remain for these young women. Laura, Alike’s butch mentor through the world of clubs and dating, hasbeen kicked out of her family home and has left school.  She lives with her understanding oldersister, Candace (Shamika Cotton), both of them struggling to make financialends meet while Laura studies for her GED.
Pernell Walker as Laura
When she finally passes the test, Laura returns toher family’s home, where her disapproving mother opens the front door warily—andonly halfway—listening with stony hostility to her daughter recite her recentachievements and saying not a word in response. When her mother closes the door in Laura’s face, you can feel Laura’s heartrendingloss and humiliation at her mother’s rejection.
Pariahupends expectations by refusing to succumb to genre stereotypes.  For instance, although the bar Laura andAlike frequent is in what Arthur (who’s a detective for the NYPD) calls a “badneighborhood,” the bar is represented as a place of heightened sexuality,experimentation, and lustful openness, but never as a site of violence orinvasion.  The women in the bar createtheir own space; since the film is set in the present, no police harassment spoilstheir fun.
Likewise, when Laura and her friends hang out onthe piers smoking dope and drinking, Rees construes the public space as openand free, rather than one in which her characters might be victimized.  Laura observes another young woman talking toa john in a car about a potential trick; in a different movie, Laura wouldstart turning tricks herself to help pay her expenses.
But in Pariah,the characters’ grit and dignity insist on hope.  Alike and Laura are smart and capable.  Only their parents’ blindness to a sexual andgendered future in which their choices are acceptable hampers their way.
Because the film is semi-autobiographical, art andcreative expression finally free Alike. Her supportive high school creative writing teacher encourages her to “digdeeper” with her poetry.  After Bina breaksher heart, Alike knows something of love and loss.  Davis plays Bina with a nice balance ofcruelty, warmth, and her own sexual confusions.  Her scenes with Oduye, as the two girls areforced together by their mothers and then gradually form their own bond, ringtrue and complicated.
In the film’s climax, Audrey physically attacksAlike when she admits she’s a lesbian, cutting her cheek with her ring andknocking her daughter to the floor.  ButBina’s cruelty and her mother’s violence only shore Alike’s resolve, and shefinds her creative voice.  Her poemsexpress both her emotional pain and her fierce determination and her talentlaunches her out of her family and into the future.
How lovely to see a film about a young lesbianthat ends with a journey toward a life of promise.  It’s worth marking how differently this storycan be told in 2012 from the way it was 10, 20, or certainly 30 years ago(think films like Personal Best in1982, or Lianna in 1983, or even Kissing Jessica Stein in 2001).  And how lovely to see a film about a younglesbian of color instead of the typical young white women moving through thisstory.
Pariah's advertising tag line offers the dictionary definition of the word:  1.  A person without status.  2.  A rejected member of society.  3.  An outcast.  Rees's film narrates how Alike turns those understandings around one by one.
The actors are uniformly terrific in a cast thatshould have been honored with one of the many ensemble award acknowledgementsgoing to films like The Help.  Oduye is wonderful as Alike, conveying bothher youthful inexperience and her self-knowledge and desire in ways that honorthe complex character Rees creates.
Walker, as Laura, brings dignity and depth to arole that could have easily fallen into the sidekick stereotype.  She and Oduye create a friendship layeredwith loyalty, tinged with lust, and shot through with its own complicateddesires, always balancing the power shifts that rock their relationshipunpredictably.  Alike, after all, stillhas parents and a home; Laura has been exiled from a family she clearly stillloves.
Pariah’s only less convincing characters areAlike’s parents, who too often seem like vehicles for her story rather thanfull-fledged people of their own. Arthur, her father, is successful professionally but unhappypersonally.  He’s clearly having an affairand barely tolerates his hovering wife. Audrey is simply unhappy, and takes out her resentments by berating herhusband and too tightly controlling her daughters.  As a mother, she’s a shrewish monster, whosedesperate insistence on Alike’s heterosexuality displaces her own failedintimacies.
Kim Wayans as Audrey
Naturally, Alike identifies with Arthur, whorecognizes his oldest daughter’s sexuality but can only support her tacitly.  He’s too weak-willed to stand up to Audrey,fleeing instead to solace outside his family and letting his daughters bear thebrunt of her wrath.  After Audrey attacksAlike, Arthur begs her to come home, but Alike stays with Laura, firmlyrefusing, until she graduates high school early and rides off to San Franciscoto accept a scholarship at UC-Berkeley.
Her relationship with her parents makes Alike’sstory conform a bit too closely to the stereotype of the father-identifyinglesbian alienated from a malignant mother. But Wayans and Parnell bring nuance to theseconventional roles, representing as they do a way of thinking about sexualityand gender that, Pariah argues, isbecoming quickly anachronistic.
When Meryl Streep won the Golden Globe award asbest actress for her performance in TheIron Lady, the gracious actor took the stage and acknowledged not only herfellow nominees, but also Adepero Oduye, who wasn’t nominated for a Globe orfor an Oscar.
Streep’s gesture was generous and true.  Pariah might still be in limitedrelease, and might never achieve the box office of a bigger film, but as anartistic statement, it’s vivid and important. The film was nominated for the 2011 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance (where Bradford Young won for Pariah's cinematography) and for various other awards, but escaped noticeby the most visible, prestigious committees.
What a shame. Pariah’s is a story that needsto be seen, heard, and told and told again. Rees’s version is moving, beautiful, and deserving.
The Feminist Spectator