How She Move
Directed by Ian Iqbal Rashid
Who would expect a dance musical like How She Move to be a fleet-footed footnote—and correction—to the high art aestheticism of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa?
How She Move has the distinction of being the most visually stylized movie yet made about the hip-hop generation. That’s saying a lot given the promiscuous misuse of “style” by commercial and music-video directors, but director Ian Iqbal Rashid goes farther than just making How She Move look flashy. His extremely high-contrast images coordinate the dark-skinned actors with the ghetto-chic milieu. Rutina Wesley as Raya, an honors student who joins a step dance crew to win scholarship money, is a wiry, wide-eyed actress-dancer and a wild yet graceful camera subject. She anchors Rashid’s stylistic excess to something real.
Through Wesley’s humanity—not the Flashdance-meets-You Got Served plot—this movie represents the curious intersection of pop exploitation, postmodern style and global politics. How She Moves’ heroine doesn’t belong to a recognizable environment, but an extrapolation of the hip-hop world where people live to dance. Raya’s high school peers turn auto shop class into a rehearsal hall (Busta Rhymes’ propulsive “Touch It’ ignites the first furious dance-off). And when they bluff each other, their angry smack-talk is strangely precise: everyone speaks in clipped diction with no contractions. An occasional lilt betrays that these are second-generation Jamaican immigrants, caught in the drugs-and-gangs slum yet dancing-out their parents’ striver’s ambitions. Though set in Brooklyn, the film looks, feels and in fact is, Canadian. So it’s an alien’s vision after all. This places How She Move somewhere between the slickness of David La Chappelle’s crunk documentary Rize and Pedro Costa’s more serious, detached underclass observation.
It’s a perfect example of class snobbery that critics who celebrate Costa refuse to connect his aestheticized work to the real world. His films Colossal Youth and The Rabbit Hunters patronize the miseries of Portugal’s poor favela-dwellers—black African emigrants who become European junkies and street people. Costa’s formalism seals these peasants and miscreants in the art-house amber of his meticulous digital-video compositions. It may be coincidental that Costa’s visual élan is replicated by Rashid’s pop-art chic, but that is indeed the case.
Yet something more happens in How She Move: African diaspora characters are rescued from art-house depredation. Screenwriter Annmarie Morais implies that dancing is a more solvent career option than auto mechanics, but at least she respects the aspirations of what Michael Harrington once termed The Other America. Raya and friends play out rags-to-riches clichés, yet even these are more clipped and precise than Hollywood’s usual slang. Raya and her rival Michelle (Tre Armstrong), her gay stepper/confidant Quake (Brennan Gademans) and Garvey (Clé Bennett), the step challenger with a great, sexy Don Cornelius voice, all move like electrified cables. They’re life forces, unlike Costa’s Third World zombies.
And in the scene where Michelle gifts Raya with a family locket (still entangled with strands of hairweave from the previous wearer), How She Move achieves a sense of female camaraderie and sacrifice that puts the pseudo-sisterhood of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days’s abortion-seekers to shame. Thank God for Pop Cinema.
Directed by Ian Iqbal Rashid
Who would expect a dance musical like How She Move to be a fleet-footed footnote—and correction—to the high art aestheticism of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa?
How She Move has the distinction of being the most visually stylized movie yet made about the hip-hop generation. That’s saying a lot given the promiscuous misuse of “style” by commercial and music-video directors, but director Ian Iqbal Rashid goes farther than just making How She Move look flashy. His extremely high-contrast images coordinate the dark-skinned actors with the ghetto-chic milieu. Rutina Wesley as Raya, an honors student who joins a step dance crew to win scholarship money, is a wiry, wide-eyed actress-dancer and a wild yet graceful camera subject. She anchors Rashid’s stylistic excess to something real.
Through Wesley’s humanity—not the Flashdance-meets-You Got Served plot—this movie represents the curious intersection of pop exploitation, postmodern style and global politics. How She Moves’ heroine doesn’t belong to a recognizable environment, but an extrapolation of the hip-hop world where people live to dance. Raya’s high school peers turn auto shop class into a rehearsal hall (Busta Rhymes’ propulsive “Touch It’ ignites the first furious dance-off). And when they bluff each other, their angry smack-talk is strangely precise: everyone speaks in clipped diction with no contractions. An occasional lilt betrays that these are second-generation Jamaican immigrants, caught in the drugs-and-gangs slum yet dancing-out their parents’ striver’s ambitions. Though set in Brooklyn, the film looks, feels and in fact is, Canadian. So it’s an alien’s vision after all. This places How She Move somewhere between the slickness of David La Chappelle’s crunk documentary Rize and Pedro Costa’s more serious, detached underclass observation.
It’s a perfect example of class snobbery that critics who celebrate Costa refuse to connect his aestheticized work to the real world. His films Colossal Youth and The Rabbit Hunters patronize the miseries of Portugal’s poor favela-dwellers—black African emigrants who become European junkies and street people. Costa’s formalism seals these peasants and miscreants in the art-house amber of his meticulous digital-video compositions. It may be coincidental that Costa’s visual élan is replicated by Rashid’s pop-art chic, but that is indeed the case.
Yet something more happens in How She Move: African diaspora characters are rescued from art-house depredation. Screenwriter Annmarie Morais implies that dancing is a more solvent career option than auto mechanics, but at least she respects the aspirations of what Michael Harrington once termed The Other America. Raya and friends play out rags-to-riches clichés, yet even these are more clipped and precise than Hollywood’s usual slang. Raya and her rival Michelle (Tre Armstrong), her gay stepper/confidant Quake (Brennan Gademans) and Garvey (Clé Bennett), the step challenger with a great, sexy Don Cornelius voice, all move like electrified cables. They’re life forces, unlike Costa’s Third World zombies.
And in the scene where Michelle gifts Raya with a family locket (still entangled with strands of hairweave from the previous wearer), How She Move achieves a sense of female camaraderie and sacrifice that puts the pseudo-sisterhood of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days’s abortion-seekers to shame. Thank God for Pop Cinema.
