Uncomfortable Truths: “Set It Off,” “Girl 6,” and “Naked Acts” at 30

At RogerEbert.com, Jourdain Searles returns to three films from 1996: Set It Off by F. Gary Gray, Girl 6 by Spike Lee, and Naked Acts by Bridgett M. Davis. The article reads these three films in the context of Black American cinema in the 1990s, a time when Black male filmmakers were more visible in the mainstream while the stories of Black women had less room to appear. Searles begins with the success of Waiting to Exhale, a film that showed how a story about the friendship, love, and lives of Black women could find a serious place at the box office and in popular culture. After that, both Set It Off and Girl 6, released in 1996, turned to women fighting to be seen and to keep their dignity. Set It Off is the story of four working-class women who turn to robbing banks after a series of pressures. The article sees this film as more successful in showing how men and institutions fail vulnerable women. These women gradually grow bolder and the bond between them grows stronger. The anger that drives them toward danger comes out of the very injustices that others would rather not see. Girl 6 follows a Black actress who, in trying to find work in Hollywood, is met with an objectifying and demeaning gaze. To support herself, she takes a job on a phone sex line. Searles considers the film's idea important but says that its judgmental tone and emotional distance keep the main character from drawing close to the viewer. Even so, the presence of Theresa Randle, the music of Prince, and the screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks give the film a distinctive place. The final part of the article is devoted to Naked Acts, an independent film that Bridgett M. Davis wrote and directed without studio backing. The story is about Cicely, an actress living in the shadow of her mother, a former star of Blaxploitation cinema, who struggles with the memory of childhood abuse and a fear of appearing nude onscreen. Searles regards Naked Acts as the rawest portrait of the mental, physical, and emotional pressures faced by Black women performers. The film is about women who are pushed to the margins and sexualized both in life and onscreen. But in the end, Cicely's path does not lead only to pain. She wants to make peace with her body and come to terms with the wound that has stayed with her since childhood. The article sees these three films as three different ways of confronting truths that American cinema was often reluctant to look at directly: being overlooked, sexualization, poverty, the body, labor, and the struggle of Black women to be seen in cinema and in society.

Read the full story at RogerEbert.com →