Unsure of what precisely is going on, but with chemistry with Simone, O’Connor has an authentic presence, a likeability, and tenderness which, when pushed, makes for the only significantly genuine arc across the film.Ĭomplaining of a lack in control, but seemingly answering to no one regarding Selah’s extensive drug trafficking and manipulation, Poe’s script is a hot mess of ideas that smash into one another. While performances range from deadpan to noticeably lacking and seldom engaging, O’Connor’s place as the new blood, the potential successor, and Selah’s new plaything is the audience’s way into the story. Lovie Simone and others are capable performers, but the characters have zero accountability or problems with authority, regularly wearing whatever they please, doing whatever they want, and suffering zero consequences, causing a detachment from the audience to these characters. A sensational, true, and persistent issue, but this isn’t demonstrated in the film. How men want them to look ‘impossible’, and how the faculty wish to control their bodies. In only one direct instance, where Selah speaks directly to the audience (in another of Jomo Fray‘s peculiar designs in the cinematography), are the expectations placed on young women addressed. Her ‘pushy’ mother is a one-note role from Gina Torres, with a monotone delivery but this is likely out of directional choice and not performance. Tayarisha Poe’s script talks of the importance of passing the torch, and the weight placed on Selah’s shoulders, but we don’t experience this gravity. Leader of the Spades and de facto controller of the student body, Selah is thoroughly unlikeable – still not a great start. Selah and The Spades itself falls into the latter category. Do it wrong, and you end up with tepid, unfocused, and pale imitations of those movies. Utilising this correctly can result in culturally significant movies. Cliques within the school dynamic is an age-old trope. Things don’t start well, with shoddy camera work attempting to emulate intricate angles, resulting in awkward shots cutting off characters and leaving vast empty frames. Could someone maintain the Spades’ influence after she leaves, or will one faction or another assert dominance? Set against the soft, rolling green mounds of a Pennsylvania boarding school, Selah and the Spades attempts to decipher the inner workings of student hierarchy through Selah, a graduating seventeen-year-old, under her mother’s scorn and the weight of the school’s underground activities as the leader of the Spades. Whether you’re a prefect, a drama bobby, or a ‘skin’, everyone struggles to find a place at school and, if cinema is to be believed, especially in America.
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