Really Love

Like Toni Morrison's fiction, Really Love is a moving portrait of Black life that's not filtered through a White gaze but instead framed as a page in the book of humanity. The cast is almost entirely Black, and the story, refreshingly, presents regular Black people leading regular lives. Isaiah and Stevie fall deeply in love and work gets in the way, as everyday a story as was ever written. Director-producer-writer Angel Kristi Williams guides us with a sure hand toward an artistic vision that isn't blind to color and differences, but that chooses to portray them as shades in a spectrum of humanity. When painter Isaiah talks about offering his deliberate visual "distortions" to portray Black lives as normal, ordinary, and extraordinary all at once, we know that the movie is striving to do the same.

This is an absorbing romance, but the director has enough faith in the depth of her material to omit extraneous drama. No need for chase sequences, drug overdoses, screaming and yelling. Instead, she mirrors the sensuality of applying paint to canvas in the beautifully-rendered scenes of lovemaking between two people who have given themselves to each other in every way. This is normal life in all its dignity, enhanced by the incidental glamour of two beautiful and gifted lead actors. Kofi Siriboe as Isaiah is a special standout. Supporting the simple and emotional message is a moving score by Khari Mateen. If it can be said to have a flaw, the movie leaves unspoken the difficulty all women face, compared to men, in the struggle to actualize potential. If racial prejudice holds Black men back from achieving, it does so doubly in the case of Black women, who face the added bias against their gender. But, the movie hints, this struggle intrudes on every couple, no matter what race, religion, or economic stratum, and it's what breaks apart the otherwise well-suited lovers portrayed here. The question is: When a woman pays for her impoverished lover's gas, is she supporting him or emasculating him?