Spike Lee’s melancholic and irresistible comedy about a jazz quintet.
Uncompromising jazz trumpeter Bleek Gilliam is balancing between his creative calling and his relationships with two girls—a withdrawn school teacher Indigo and a sensual singer Clarke. One of Spike Lee’s most underrated films, Mo' Better Blues was featured in the main competition at the 1990 Venice film festival.
Mo' Better Blues is Lee’s most Altman-esque movie: an exploration of the musical backstage with long pan shots and overlapping dialogue. Characters shout over each other, and the protagonist is so focused on his music that, at times, he literally stops hearing others. Lee gently brings the viewer to the idea of the need for change and the importance of the other’s opinion.
The world of Blues might seem non-feminine and strictly homosocial at first: the all-male jazz band’s backstage and concert are sacred spaces not to be tarnished by the presence of women. Female characters—the Madonna, the whore, and the grotesque French lady—seem lifeless, almost a travesty of women, jealous to the point of counting the condoms used by men. Closer to the end, however, the idea of a rebellious artist and his obedient muse is reviewed: the women have their revenge, and the men reveal their own rigidity and inability to listen.
Spike Lee made Mo' Better Blues with a team of his regular collaborators of the time. Terence Blanchard wrote the score, and the unforgettable characters were played by Denzel Washington (Malcolm X), Wesley Snipes (Jungle Fever), Giancarlo Esposito (School Daze), Joie Lee (She's Gotta Have It), and the Turturro brothers (Do the Right Thing), whose portrayal of two Jewish businessmen caused critics to accuse Lee of antisemitism. Samuel L. Jackson appeared in a cameo, and Lee himself played the short and unlucky music manager Giant. The main star of the film, however, is the unjustly overlooked cinematographer and later director Ernest Dickerson. His warm palette of yellows, oranges, reds, and browns symbolically takes the viewer from the end of the twentieth century, when the film is set, to its beginning—the golden age of jazz; while his visual inventions (circular panoramas around characters, slower projection in key moments, parallel jump cuts in the fight scene) hold together the otherwise slightly out-of-focus plot.
The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.
Mo' Better Blues
Director: Spike Lee
USA, 1990. 130 min. 16+
