PARIAH (USA 2011) **
Directed by Dee Rees

The film begins with the dictionary definition of the word PARIAH.  We get it already.  The film’s protagonist, Alike is one and director Dee Rees is dead serious about her subject.

Alike (newcomer Adepero Oduye) is a seventeen-year old high-school girl living in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighbourhood.  She is smart (from her poem about cocoons and butterflies) and creative, much to the approval of her parents.  But Alike is also a lesbian, unbeknown to her cop father, Arthur (Charles Parnell) and church going unloving mother, Audrey (Kim Wayans).

If this film feels like Lee Daniel’s PRECIOUS, Rees must have surely modelled her film after that.  PARIAH falls into all the traps that made PRECIOUS (which I absolutely HATED) a flawed film.  Both films take their subject too seriously.  But PRECIOUS was much worse, taking the whole film to a different level of ‘over-the-top’.  Though Rees film seems more believable, Rees seems intent of piling one affliction after another on poor Alike.

She has a horrid mother who nags her half the time.  When Alike comes nice to her, the mother rebukes her in the name of the Bible.  Father Arthur fares no better, screaming abusive words at his wife.  He does not know how to love Alike who seems content to do well at school.  Maybe the excuse is that he is a cop.  Both films PRECIOUS and PARIAH take the easy way out of having their protagonists succeed at school as a way of a happy ending.  But Alike has an understanding littler sister Sharonda (Sahra Mellesse) able to accept her sister the way she is.

In PRECIOUS, Precious is able to read a fairy tale after 3 weeks of school when she was unable to readout the word seashore before.  In PARIAH, Alike writes an over-the-top poem (that is read out loud twice during the movie) about a cocoon breaking the sunlight to become a beautiful butterfly.  How do these filmmakers come up with these scripts?

In short, PARIAH is a coming-of-age, African American lesbian film with a dysfunctional family at its core.  This is box-office poison and one must admire director Rees for undertaking such a dauntless task for her directorial debut.  Unfortunately, her film lacks humour, insight and interest, falling back on over dramatization of made-up dramatic set-ups that audiences have seen once too often in other dramas.