In Sidney Poitier’s A Warm December, the
star/director plays Matt Younger, a widowed American doctor on vacation in London
with his young daughter; he falls in love with Catherine Oswandu (Ester
Anderson), the mover-and-shaker niece of the “Republic of Torunda’s” Ambassador
to Britain, eventually learning that she has fatal sickle-cell anemia, and only
a few years to live. The film’s main virtue, and not a negligible one, is its
very Blackness: race is never cited as an issue in any context, and it incorporates
several diverse scenes of Black music and culture (ranging from Miriam Makeba to
an odd open-air scene in which Younger and Catherine play records for a group
of rural white kids, as their elders look on in mostly bemused fashion). Much else
about it is disappointing or confounding though. The initial scenes, for
whatever reason, have a cloak-and-dagger feel about them, shrouding the purpose
of Younger’s trip in some mystery, and presenting Catherine as a stylishly
mysterious figure with a host of ethnically diverse people on her trail; that
all peters out, the film then becoming mostly defined by repetitive soppiness (aided
by a generally excruciating music score, drawing not at all on the best of
Black culture) with Catherine’s entourage and duties and mercurial nature
repeatedly thwarting Younger’s plans and dreams. In truth though, given Poitier’s
predominantly bland performance, it’s hard to know why the guy keeps at it, and
the film doesn’t make the most of Anderson’s vivid presence; Yvette Curtis is
intriguingly stoic as Younger’s daughter, although the film treats her as little
more than a plot device. The ending might be read as an endorsement of prioritizing
nation-building pragmatism over personal desire, but if so that’s mostly
botched too. Still, for all its flaws, the film is notable as the high point of
Poitier’s directorial ambition; following its failure he stuck entirely to
comedy (well, and Fast Forward…)
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