Simply Perfect

Just perfect...

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

In Brooklyn, Nola Darling dislikes commitment and she has three lovers at the same time. Jamie Overstreet is sweet and looking for a lifelong companion. Greer Childs is a self-obsessed model. Mars Blackmon (Spike Lee) is a loud-mouth childman. Nola, her friends and family narrate the movie talking directly into the camera. Opal Gilstrap is a lesbian who likes Nola. Her free-love policy runs into trouble when the three men discover each other's relationship with Nola.This is Spike Lee's first full-length feature as a writer/director and he is also a major supporting actor. This announces the arrival of a new American cinematic voice. It's inventive and different. Sure the actors are mostly amateurs but everybody has a good charismatic energy. Spike Lee is bringing a lot of different elements into this movie. Most impressively, he has turned the normal sexual relationship between man and woman upside-down. It is a great debut and an imaginative indie.

Spike Lee's low-budget, directorial debut "She's Gotta Have It" ranks as the outspoken African-American's helmer's best and least pretentious film. This modest but compelling portrait of single black woman Nola Darling qualifies as one of the greatest feminist films of the 1980s. The theme of women versus men dominates the action with the corresponding themes of women versus women and women versus society tangling for second place. The men fall back on the traditional precedents that society has established for women. Consequently, this melodrama exposes the sexual double-standard issue between men and women. Indeed, men cite dating multiple women as their masculine birthright, while a woman must only date one man at a time. "She's Gotta Have It" torpedoes that argument with its unorthodox heroine. Moreover, coming as it did on the last years of "blaxploitation" movie, Lee's film is refreshing different because none of the men are portrayed stereotypically as either pimps or drug dealers. The cast, headed by Tracy Camilla Johns, is largely unknown, but they perform well in this simple, but powerful 84 minute melodrama that asks the audience to decide if the leading lady—Nola—is a freak. In other words, is Nola a slut because she has three boyfriends that she has sex with in her apartment in New York City. Lee makes excellent use of the technique of breaking the fourth wall—when the thespians address the audience by looking directly into the camera at us—and taking their argument to us. The heroine has a relationship with a romantically inclined lover Jamie Overstreet (Tommy Redmond Hicks), a stuck-up, egotistical performer Greer Childs (John Canada Terrell), and young, snappy street dude Mars Blackmon (Spike Lee). None of the three guys likes each other as they struggle to please Nola. One of Nola's apartment house neighbors is an attractive lesbian Opal Gilstrap (Raye Dowell of "Malcolm X") who tries without success to seduce Nola.

The world was introduced to Spike Lee with "She's Gotta Have It", about one Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns) and her three lovers (Lee plays one of them). Everyone in the movie has their own kinds of shortcomings, but they're all honest people, all trying to make their way in the world. Spike Lee was clearly showing the talent that he would bring to his later movies.I should remind you that this is not a movie for people with short attention spans. Most of it is very low-key, involving a lot of dialog. But it's a very impressive flick at that. Maybe this is mainly a flick for film buffs, but I recommend it to everyone.

When I first heard about this film, I very much thought that it was going to be nothing more than a black t&a flick. However, I this film turned out to be an interesting character study, which looks not only at black sexuality, but at the way people look at different stereotypes of men and women. You had sensitive Jamie, arrogant Greer and space cadet Mars all chasing after one of the first truly sexually liberated women to ever be portrayed on the silver screen in Nola. This film also shows how when a man has a lot of sexual partners, they are pretty much looked at a stud, but if a woman has a lot of partners she is looked at as a nymphomaniac. This film pretty much takes those stereotypes and turns them around. The only negative criticisms I have is the fact that as the film goes on it tries to become a serious drama, especially in the scene when Jamie rapes Nola. Also, the film fails to address the idea of safe sex, especially since this film was released just as the AIDS crisis was really beginning to infect the black community. Other than those criticisms this was a pretty decent early effort from Spike Lee.