Movie: Love & Basketball (Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2000)
Watching people who desperately want things negotiate often conflicting interests in the pursuit of their hopes and dreams, is inherently compelling. That’s one reason why sports movies are so reliable. As long as they are competently made, it’s hard not to find at least a little enjoyment in them. They also require more suspension of disbelief than your average science-fiction film. That’s not just because scripted narratives can’t ever convey, and are in direct opposition to, the unpredictability of sports, but also because most of us watch sports on television, and sport broadcasts around the world are pretty much unified in their visual grammar. A basketball game in Brazil will be presented in much the same way as a basketball game in Nigeria, South Korea or Serbia. A film is unable to follow these visual rules when showing sports and as a result the final ‘big game’ never quite has the impact that it’s supposed to have. You are always aware of its staginess, the awkward flow, and the unnatural movements of the actors. In its climax Love & Basketball handles this ‘problem’ better than any film I’ve seen.
I was enjoying this film very much, but wasn’t sure whether it was truly great or just incredibly effective at pandering exactly to my sensibilities. This is after all an epic basketball romance spanning multiple decennia, divided in four chapters it calls first, second, third and fourth quarters, that consistently tries to find original ways of dramatizing the games. In one case, it shows it literally from the point of view of Monica (Sanaa Lathan), putting us right in the middle of the court and even allowing us to hear her thought process as she is attacking the basket or defending an opponent. In addition to all that, it’s also a nuanced look at how basketball players deal with getting to, being in, and having to leave, the (W)NBA. It’s wonderful throughout, but its ending turns it into a classic.
Prince-Bythewood turns the final pick-up game into a sports match whose outcome doesn’t merely depend on the basketball talent of Monica and Quincy (Omar Epps), but also on their personal feelings. They are asked to negotiate between following their natural instincts as ballers and their willingness to potentially hurt each other, with the added complexity of both of them knowing that love and basketball are intertwined. Betraying one could mean betraying the other. As such the awkwardness and hesitation of their basketball moves here is both a natural expression of how these people would behave in this particular situation, and an integral part of an intensely competitive game with an outcome we are uncertain of, but highly invested in. The scene is pretty much what movies are for and it’s probably the closest a sports film will ever come to reimagining the story of Orpheus (at least, its most famous part).
It's a slight shame that Prince-Bythewood doesn’t end on Quincy’s great final line, but the actual final scene of Monica as a professional WNBA player watched by her daughter is also an intelligent one, as the film is also about Monica’s struggle to identify herself as both a woman and a basketball player. Love and Basketball begins with Monica arriving at a basketball court dressed as a boy, only to show herself as a girl when Quincy and his friends allow her to play with them. Throughout her childhood she fights with her mom about her unwillingness to wear dresses and make-up and do other girly things. The film lets Monica be unsure whether she does that because she doesn’t fit mainstream gender roles, because she wants to imitate her idol Magic Johnson, or because she fears exclusion from basketball if she acts too womanly. Whatever the answer is, she has found peace at the end.
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