By far and away the year’s best date movie, Southside With You , begins thus: a woman, half-undressed, gets herself ready for what she insists is not a date. To her mind she’s going to a community event with a young summer associate at her prestigious Chicago law firm. Living with her parents still, the inevitable gentle teasing over her evident excitement only has her sidestepping the obvious with effortless grace.
Barry, our lead, is a smooth-talking type. His full name elicits a bemused “Barack O-whata?” from his date’s father, who says this by way of asking for clarification on its correct pronunciation. If, up to this point, you didn’t know the film chronicles the first date between Barack and Michelle Obama, you do now.
No need to trawl the interweb looking for fan-fiction imagining the couple’s bright, love-filled future once the closing credits roll – we know it ends happily ever after. Sort of. Minus birther claims, drones, daily and painful reminders that America is not a post-racial society, gun control and on and on.
This week’s US presidential debate taught us many things, one of which is that we sure will miss Barack and Michelle. First-time director Richard Tanne fleshes out just why this is the case. It is not simply their brilliance as orators. There is a sense, as much as one can get this from a screen, that they were once normal, perhaps not quite like you and I, but at least existing on a continuum that feels familiar. When you hear the names of George Osborne or Bush or indeed Donald Trump, that sense of connection just isn’t there. The magic of the Obamas has been that they seem able to understand the concerns of ordinary people. They can relate and are in turn relatable.
Tanne’s film also presents us with an opportunity to think about diversity, or the lack of it, in cinema. Watching two African-American leads in a film targeted at mainstream audiences raises the question of why equal representation on the big screen is still an issue.
Unless your cinematic diet consists strictly of Bollywood extravaganzas, one image of romantic relationships dominates. It’s a pretty white heterosexual boy meeting and falling for a pretty white heterosexual girl. This archetype is what the rest of us are asked to imagine ourselves into. The romantic leads are supposed to be relatable because of a flimsy claim to universality. The truth is that love stories in the real world exist in breathtaking diversity. The sort of diversity we are yet to consume without making a big fuss over it being a love story about two women, or two people in wheelchairs.
This issue of diversity in romance applies across all cinema and TV. Part of why I resisted watching Game of Thrones for as long as I did was because I couldn’t go through another 50 hours of TV seeing not very many people of colour in ways that weren’t troubling. If it is a world in which dragons can exist, is it too much to ask for it also to be a world in which characters with some melanin do not grunt their way though speech?
For those who inevitably respond that imaginary worlds can be accessed by all, and that there needs to be a little less seriousness and a little more lightness, I say: cinema and TV continue to define universality in white terms. White terms that everyone else must push and prod themselves into fitting.
Next month the British Film Institute will launch its Black Star season. With screenings across 90 different locations in the country, it is a series celebrating the richness and diversity of black talent on screen. That it should need staging is a sign of how far we have to go. Going on a date this weekend? At a loss for what to see at your local cinema? Fret no more. Southside With You – a universal story of falling in love.
