Alile Sharon Larkin’s beautiful A
Different Image is an extraordinarily full 51 minutes of cinema, lightly
but meaningfully expressed at every turn. Its focus is on a young woman, Alana,
who predominantly wants time and space to work on her art, to enjoy her friends
and to explore whatever means of self-expression occur to her. This may not
sound like a radical project, but it’s subject to skepticism and/or attack from
all directions: from her mother who doesn’t understand her resistance to
getting married and generating grandchildren; from her female co-worker who can’t
believe she could have a platonic male friend, Vincent; and then most sadly
from Vincent himself, who (albeit partly driven by peer pressure from his Playboy-reading
friend) ultimately can’t resist the urge to sexualize their relationship (at
one point he reads to her a famous passage from Ralph Ellison’s The
Invisible Man, without any apparent awareness that Black women might experience
their own different form of invisibility, or all-too-visibility). The placement
of “image” in the title reflects the film’s reflection on representation for worse
and better: Larkin’s camera on the one hand taking in soft porn and sexualized advertising
billboards, and on the other offering a lovingly curated selection of photographs
of Black women, existing not to be mimicked or subjected to hollow praise, but
as cherished reference points in achieving growth and self-awareness (the
film’s final photograph, of Larkin herself, adds a wonderfully personal
perspective on this). The film has a warm and delicate approach to its characters:
while it leaves no doubt that Vincent crosses a line (Alana explicitly accuses
him of rape) it also allows us to see her from his perspective, to convey the
heightened sense of presence and connection that contributes to his misreading
of the moment, leading to a final note of partial reconciliation, in which
Vincent seems to be at least starting out on better understanding her
perspective.
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