Stella Meghie’s THE WEEKEND and The Black Rom-Com State of The Union

Aubrey: So, what do you do?

Zadie: I’m a comedian. I … thought I told you that earlier.

Aubrey: I thought you were joking.

Zadie: [sighs] No one takes me seriously.

Aubrey: Wait, is that true?

Zadie: Uh, yeah, maybe, I don’t know. It’s an occupational hazard. Probably my fault.

Aubrey: Why is that?

Zadie: Because I constantly talk like I’m the supporting actress of a romantic comedy. But, I feel very … serious … around you right now.

Played by real-life actress/comedian and SNL alum Sasheer Zamata, Zadie Barber is the acerbic, wittily pouty protagonist in Stella Meghie’s 2018 indie rom-com The Weekend. Aubrey is the mystery male guest who’s spending the eponymous weekend at Zadie’s retired parents’ bed ’n’ breakfast, where Zadie is reluctantly playing third-wheel host to her ex, Bradford, and his new girlfriend, Margot. The above exchange takes place on a wryly flirtatious walk the same night the two meet. Aubrey has just joined the unwieldy group for drinks at the earlier behest of Margot, earnest but also eager to disperse the unwieldiness of their threesome into a hopefully less awkward double-date-like scenario. The last line of their conversation is an admittedly blunt nod to the camera, but, I think, a necessary one. One can never have too many reminders of where Black women are historically positioned in the landscape of mainstream romantic comedies. In the never-ending quest to assert the artistic merits of Black stories on the big screen, the landscape, while idyllic for most, has been a crucial industry battleground for Black makers and performers. The only bit of restraint the film’s script, also written by Meghie, shows is in not naming the typecast more precisely, but we (Black filmgoers) all know a “Black best friend” reference when we hear one.

Virtually invisible in the genre throughout the ’70s and ’80s, the much-needed but short-lived Black rom-com boom of the ’90s and early aughts sought to move Black people, particularly Black women, from the side to the front as the stars of their own love stories. Romance films, whether dramatic or comedic, like Stella Meghie’s third feature (after her 2015's Jean of the Joneses and 2017’s Everything, Everything) and her recently released The Photograph, could be a signpost for a potential resurgence. The drop-off after the era of Boomerang, Love Jones, Brown Sugar, The Best Man, Love and Basketball, and Deliver From Eva, has been stark, particularly for comedies. As suggested in the 2019 Glamour piece, “Where Did All the Black Rom-Coms Go?”, reasons for this amount to some combination of anything from the rise of Tyler Perry and superhero movies, to an industry-wide decline in the green-lighting of rom-coms that, as with most things, disproportionately affected what had been a robust, fairly big-budget genre for Black films. The piece goes on to argue that even as a recent spate of romantic comedies featuring non-white characters, like Crazy Rich Asians, are breaking sales and streaming records, the lack of Black leads is palpable. It also mirrors the American culture machine’s studied inability (read: unwillingness) to allow more than one “minority” group to have a “moment” at the same time. It goes on to quote Deliver Us From Eva director Gary Hardwick, who adds this: “There’s a little bit of the ‘been there, don that’ in the minds of people [when it comets Black rom-coms], as if we know everything now that we need to know about Black people in love, which is not true.” In other words, much like with seminal Black TV shows of the millennial coming-of-age years, Living Single, Martin, and Girlfriends—shows that pulled big numbers in an era when primetime sitcoms were struggling then were summarily dismissed when networks discovered prep school vampires and football—the industry seems to see Black rom-coms as having outlived their novelty and therefore their usefulness. In some ways this mirrors Hollywood’s treatment of mainstream rom-coms. After the Will Smith and Tom Cruise age of the summer blockbuster tailed off, the movie business relied on a huge surge of rom-coms, and their woman-centric audiences, to get through what were some relatively lean years for the fanboy market from Wild Wild West to the first Iron Man. The general, typically sickening, consensus in that the white-male-run studio establishment didn’t need women anymore now that they had superhero franchises, which had a especially devastating impact on Black films and, in particular, the already precarious plight of Black actresses.

These scenarios highlight a few key things about the romantic comedy genre and its distinctly uneven playing field that make it particularly powerful when it comes to creating meaning and shifting film culture. One, rom-coms have the uniquely consistent  potential to make big money on small budgets. This makes them the perfect cyclical go-to when the movie industry has to scale back financially or hits a creative slump. Two, rom-coms create stars. This is especially true for actresses looking to level up to the rank of perennial Oscar contender. Emma Stone, Reese Witherspoon, and Jennifer Lawrence all owe the genre, to some degree, for the kind of name recognition that gets actresses to the tippy-top of producer lists. There are Twitter rants upon Twitter rants to be had about the glacier-like pace at which Black actresses are forced to watch their careers progress. Emma Stone had at least eight leading or co-leading roles under her belt before her 30th birthday. Compare that to 37-year-old Lupita Nyong’o who admittedly got into acting later in life but whom Jordan Peele was eager to cast in Us in large part because he was so shocked that nearly seven years after her Oscar win for 12 Years A Slave, she still hadn’t played a lead in a film. In Sanaa Lathan and Gabrielle Union, you have two Black actresses who did get relative boosts from the rom-com heyday but who didn’t lead films until their late 20s, early 30s, and whose award-winning and blockbuster potential, respectively, has remained capped at mostly Black-audience production. Consider Regina King, whose career started in 1985 and includes scene-stealing moments in two of the most seismic romance films ever made (Jerry Maguire, How Stella Got Her Groove Back) and two iconic turns opposite peak Reese Witherspoon and Sandra Bullock. King didn’t land a non-animated leading role of any kind until TV’s Southland in 2009, at age 36 and didn’t garner near-top billing in a film until If Beale Street Could Talk two years ago, at age 46. Now, consider Jennifer Lopez. Close in age to her aforementioned Black colleagues and similarly late bloomer compared to her white counterparts, Lopez road the same rom-com wave that got the likes of Lathan, Union, Nia Long, and Regina Hall their start but who’s ability to pass as essentially any non-Black ethnicity producers could dream up for her character propelled her into A-list status and a veritable mini-empire.

The rom-com, while significantly less lucrative for Black actresses than their white counterparts, still used to be one of the few reliable avenues for expediting their careers. As Gary Hardwick laments, “A lot of actors who are stars now were broke to the public in those Black romantic comedies; that’s maybe the sad part of this—our actors are finding it hard to advance from being unknowns to being kind of known to being well known.” This is why a recent interview with Viola Davis went viral as she very directly laid out to the attending reporter why she, 24 years into her career and one statue away from an EGOT, still isn’t on the same industry level as a Meryl Streep and what that says about dark skin and worthiness. 

Speaking of Meryl, even she knows what making the occasional dip in the well of rom-com can do for one’s marketability, particularly as it’s one of the few genres that consistently if obligatorily holds space for older actresses, even if they are mostly helicopter mother-in-laws or late-life divorcees. And, of course, there’s the eternal grand dame of neurotic-white-woman romantic fantasy, Dianne Keaton, whose work brings us to Nancy Meyers and reason number three that rom-coms are so culturally vital: their capacity to communicate class. No other genre is as fluent in the visual language and narrative subtext of capitalist aspiration and class ritual as the rom-com. The long, lingering tracking shots of white marble countertops, immaculately manicured gardens, and exposed brick says more about who is deserving of love and what kind of stock they come from in a single opening credit sequence than 120 minutes of any hyper-verbal family drama. Much like the male question of who is deserving of respect and power is tied to net worth, the female question of who is deserving of love and security is inextricable from family status, pedigree, and skin color. (This is particularly pertinent to Black women whose prospects for partnership and real-world safety are constantly precarious in a society that sees women’s desirability as directly linked to whether they’re worthy of happiness and protection.) Even when genre acolytes like Nora Ephron inject their scripts with just enough white feminist jus to give their films the faintest flavor of subversion, it’s ultimately always done with one foot in the door to marriage, religion, and patriarchy as made lucrative by their relation to whiteness. Even your average Cinderella/Maid in Manhattan scenario demands that the leading love interest first prove herself to be pure at heart, virtually saint-like before she’s deemed worthy of her mediocre prince.

It’s exactly this class arena into which Black rom-coms stepped, almost incidentally, in the early 1990s. When Hollywood saw an opportunity to double the return on their investment by swapping out Cameron Diazes for Gabrielle Unions for half the budget, Black filmmakers saw a chance to capitalize on a burgeoning college-educated Black middle class and as Hardwick tells Glamour, “tell different stories, more sophisticated stories, stories that are not necessarily linked to the struggles of our past.” Black Hollywood quickly began to follow directors like Malcolm D. Lee (The Best Man) and the Hudlin Brothers, whose 1992 classic, Boomerang, even inspired a real-life non-profit for young Black advertisers, in using rom-coms as aspirational canvases on which to depict images of professional success. This represented an important departure from previous films like 1974’s Claudine, where Diahann Carroll’s single mother on welfare and James Earl Jones’ garbage collector depicted a version of Black love both profoundly inhibited by and enduring in spite of deep racial and socioeconomic inequality. Whereas, as characters in white-centric films like Something’s Gotta Give or When Harry Met Sally, airily free of any such social impediments, are essentially cast as having it all, except for love, Black romances represented a community with nothing but love to get them through the day.

Meghie’s The Weekend is the kind of film that grew up studying all of the above and landing on a thematic context and overall aesthetic that asserts both a lightness rarely afforded Black female protagonists and a grounded sense of humor that allows for a subtle multidimensionality impression that doesn’t flatten its characters as intrinsic to “Black struggle” or as overtly commercial avatars of “Black success.” In Meghie’s own words:

“I love romance, I love comedy, so I always lean that way. But all I care about is Black people being themselves and their existential struggle on camera. I want Black women to be just fully formed. We’re not one thing or another. We’re not aggressive or weak. We’re human, we’re many things. I always just try to make them human and specific to who we are.” 

The line of dialogue that intros this piece is a sign of the film’s spiritual starting point: what if the Black best friend got her own movie? This is fun not just because it opens up a pigeonhole but because it’s a tongue-in-cheek jab at the staidness of rom-com’s structure in general. Zadie isn’t just a Black character inserted into the rom-com lead archetype because, quiet as it’s kept, romantic female leads are kinda boring; too self-serious and rarely allowed to be funny. The set design, inspired by Meghie’s own mother’s bed-and-breakfast, is a conscious rendering of taste that coopts the Meyers formula to allow full range of motion for its Black characters without forcing them to qualify their multidimensionality or occasional carefreeness with by passing a class test. The film’s beautifully warm lighting and cinematographer Kris Belchevski’s lush tracking shots lend The Weekend a laid-back, new wave aesthetic that artfully lowers the stakes without lowering expectations. The four-person hike leading up to The Weekend’s climactic conflict is a surreal meandering montage of interchanging couples and pivotal conversations that distills the onscreen action to a tightly woven set piece more evocative of a play than the typical romantic comedy. With its a bouncing bebop soundtrack, the sequence is a sly solution to exposition that hides in plain sight and allows the characters to exist, for a few moments, outside of time, without the weightiness of societal expectations or notions of Blackness, while they figure things out.

The impressive Sasheer Zamata’s dryly self-deprecating, cathartically petty take on Zadie allows Meghie to explore her aims by playing pointedly with notions of likability. Says Meghie, “I wanted to write a character who didn’t really have a filter, that probably had a few social adjustment issues.” She goes on to remind us, “Also I’m Jamaican, so I feel like Jamaicans have much less of a filter as well.” In a one-and-a-half-star review by Matt Fagerholm for rogerebert.com, he berates Zadie’s character for her “sour,” “Debbie Downer routine,” further arguing that “Aubrey’s maddeningly chipper disposition signals that he’s either in denial about Zadie’s hurtful nature or he’s just an underdeveloped idealized love interest.” And, while her endless jibes at her ex’s new partner, Margot (played bravely and concisely by the pitch-perfect DeWanda Wise), do edge toward cruelty in moments, that’s kind of the point. The fact that Fagerholem can’t possibly imagine how Aubrey (a charmingly understated performance by Insecure’s Y’lan Noel) could find Zadie’s stream-of-conscience prickliness attractive says a lot about mainstream film’s definition of female likability. And, his complete lack of critique for Bradford (Tone Bell) who never once publicly stands up to Zadie on behalf of his girlfriend, shows more about his expectations for women in Zadie’s position than it does about the film’s illustration of a 30-something stuck between a lost love she never got over and the impending responsibility of independence as a Black woman in an industry built to break her confidence. His insistence on reading her genuinely funny, endless reel of barbs and off-color jokes as vindictive and cruel instead of mischievous and protective indicates he might simply be missing the proper dialect to contextualize what he’s seeing. It’s all open to interpretation, but if you can’t recognize the difference between “mean” and “petty,” between an attack and a subtweet, then maybe Zadie is too much for you. As her mother Karen, effortlessly embodied by the brilliant, under appreciated Kym Whitley, admonishes a secretly still-lovestruck Bradford, “I want Zadie to have someone who wants Zadie.”