Alma’s Rainbow: Restored Black Girl’s Coming-Of-Age Film Strikes a Contemporary Chord
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
The newly restored Alma’s Rainbow, one of handful of feature films directed by Black women in the 1980s and 1990s, is no doubt historically and culturally important.
More than that, it’s a lot of fun once you adjust to the low-budget theatricality and lightly didactic style. Ayoka Chenzira, an experimental multidisciplinary filmmaker who started her career in the late-70s, created this broadly presented coming-of-age story. It unfolds in a montage of set-piece scenes so full of dance and song that it threatens to burst into a full-fledged Broadway musical.
Though the style can seem quaint, the film’s focus on Black womanhood, beauty standards, and matriarchal connections is entirely topical. Victoria Gabrielle Platt, who was in her early twenties when the film was made, stars as Rainbow, the tomboyish teenaged daughter of a strict single mother, Alma (Kim Weston-Moran) who runs a beauty parlor out of her Brooklyn townhouse.
Alma makes extra cash from her predatory landlord, an undertaker, by doing the hair and make-up of corpses, a side hustle in keeping with her saturnine disposition.
Alma had Rainbow out of wedlock when she was young, and she is determined to prevent her daughter from repeating her mistakes. She sends Rainbow to her a Catholic parochial school, where she hopes the nuns can protect her from the dangers of boys.
But Rainbow, whose youthful vitality is too strong to restrain, cuts classes to practice hip-hop street dancing with two boys, Sea Breeze and Pepper, who she bosses about. Rainbow, who prefers bike shorts and a T-shirt to a school uniform, is not quite sure she wants to grow up. So, she wraps a piece of cloth around her chest to hide her breasts and watches, with both scorn and envy, as the sexy, silly girls flirt with her dance partners.
The home atmosphere is not exactly sex-positive. When Rainbow has her first period, the chorus of hairdressers who work at the mother’s salon are full of warning advice: “Keep your pants up and your dress down.” advises one. “If I were you, I wouldn’t do it,” advises another. “I wouldn’t do it with anybody. It hurt.”
All this changes with the arrival of aunt Ruby (Mizan Kirby), a glamorous singer, dancer and all-around diva, who comes for a prolonged visit after a decade in Paris where she has been working as a Josephine Baker impersonator. In a film of broad performances, Kirby dials it up to 11. With her arch theatricality and fabulous costumes, the character is intended to be comically vain — she soon has the undertaker using his hearse as her personal limo.
For Rainbow, she offers a more heroic version of womanhood than her mother’s sad repression. Ruby, who has a chestful of fancy costumes, costume jewelry and lingerie, provides an entirely different model of independence. “Don’t let nobody see you rehearse. Don’t take second best from nobody. Always claim your space!” she instructs Rainbow, as she swings her hips across the room to demonstrate what claiming your space means.
Even Alma is emotionally awakened by Ruby who, though irresponsible and broke, has followed her artistic dreams. Years before, Alma and Ruby were a performing act called The Flamingo Sisters, when they believed that all you needed was “a good breakfast, a pot to piss in, and a window to throw it out of.”
But Alma got pregnant and Ruby, chastened, went off to Paris. Now, under Ruby’s spell, even Alma begins to thaw, taking up with a handsome handyman (Lee Dobson). Confused by the ways of men and women, Rainbow considers getting her own virginity out of the way, to get on with the complicated pleasures and pains of adult life.
Like two other pioneering films by Black women filmmakers — Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Leslie Harris’ Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (1992) — Alma’s Rainbow is the first and only feature film from its director.
Chenzira, now in her late sixties, has been busy as a professor, producer, experimental filmmaker, animator, and television director. It’s impossible to look at these films without thinking of all the potential films from Black women filmmakers that were made, though the absence adds to the significance of those few that exist.
Alma’s Rainbow. Written and directed by Ayoka Chenzira. Starring Victoria Gabrielle-Platt, Kim Weston-Moran, and Mizan Kirby. At Toronto’s Revue Cinema August 7 to 10 before expanding to other theatres.