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Miss Juneteenth (Channing Godfrey Peoples, 2020)
🕑 Added 2020-06-22 23:03:54 +0000 UTC
A reasonably promising debut film, Miss Juneteenth speaks to the difficulty of funding and producing a truly independent African-American cinema, even today when there is so clearly a hunger for such films from so many parts of our culture. Filmed in Fort Worth, Peoples' film has a rich, lived-in atmosphere, in which the weathered houses, junkyards, icehouses, and AME churches all teem with ordinary men and women too seldom seen in the cinema. As we watch Turquoise (Nicole Beharie) move between her several jobs -- tending bar, assisting a mortician, and raising her precocious daughter Kai (Alexis Chikaeze) -- Miss Juneteenth immerses us in the unique rhythms of black Texas, with its combination of hip-hop and cowboy influences (sometimes referred to as the "Yeehaw Agenda").
The trouble with Miss Juneteenth is that its overt plot is extremely awkward and often painfully predictable, as though Peoples felt the need to squeeze the strongest elements of her cinematic vision into a marketable container. Turquoise, a former Miss Juneteenth beauty queen, was sidelined in life by the (presumably unplanned) birth of Kai, and although she meets all of her obligations and then some, she can often be seen wistfully gazing it her old photo albums or even donning her Miss Juneteenth tiara. So Turquoise pressures Kai to enter the pageant, under the auspices of pursuing the full-ride scholarship awarded to the winner, but clearly because she wants her daughter to fulfill her own broken dreams.
Although the film eventually undoes this pathology, it never really seems to take issue with it, and Peoples' characterization of Turquoise's helicopter parenting, versus the "unreliable" presence of Kai's father Ronnie (Kendrick Sampson), is illogical, coming down to Oprah-style gender preference / girl power, rather than any meaningful critique of fatherhood. It's just one of a number of ways that Miss Juneteenth plays to the prejudices of its presumed audience.
