Aleshea Harris takes the religious undercurrents of Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” and dirties them, wisely, in her new revenge thriller.
Night rarely falls on the harsh, sun-bleached world of Aleshea Harris’s film “Is God Is,” a revenge parable about the breaking, or the burning, of the Black family. A glare backgrounds the protagonists, twins with matching cornflower box braids, named Racine and Anaia, who carry on their skin, to varying degrees, burn scars. Racine and Anaia are motherless and fatherless. They work as cleaners at an office; at one point, Racine exposes a raised scar, on her arm, to a pretty, professionalized woman, who recoils in disgust, activating Racine’s violent instincts of reprisal. Anaia’s scarring is a different situation. Her face is keloided up to the neck, like raised tree roots, like the meaning of Racine’s name. Racine, played by Kara Young, is a beauty in the face but a bullet in the body, ready to attack any and all who shrink back in disgust at the sight of her sister, who is played by Mallori Johnson. The opening scene is in sepia flashback, and it shows the twins as children, filmed from the back, at a playground. A child taunts Anaia offscreen, prompting Racine to beat him bloody.
One day, Racine receives a letter from a woman claiming to be the twins’ mother, Ruby, asking them to come see her, as she is dying. Anaia, feeling jilted that the letter was addressed only to Racine, cowers in hurt, like a street cat. How was she forgotten? Aren’t Racine and Anaia one? The sisters, brushing their teeth, speak telepathically, inner thoughts printed in caption text across the screen. When they do go to meet their mother, the encounter is a shock to the twins; the scene, in its gothic splendor, is a shock to the viewer. Ruby, played by Vivica A. Fox, is a bedridden queen, mummified in compression wraps, immobile except for the lips, and attended to by nurses wearing gold door-knocker earrings, as if ladies-in-waiting, who file her talon nails and braid the ropes of her wig. A mask obscures her own extraordinary scarring. Racine, manic with zeal, reasons that Ruby must be God, given that she created the twins. In flashback, this god tells us what happened to her. The twins’ father (Sterling K. Brown), credited as Man in the script, slipped into the family home, knocked her unconscious, and set her on fire. (He is shot from the mouth down, in classic horror-camp style.) The flames claimed the girls as collateral, scarring both of them but disfiguring Anaia, who worked the hardest to save Ruby. She informs her daughters that their father took up with other women, and gives them information to set them on their way. Her dying wish: “Make your daddy dead,” Ruby/God commands. “Real dead.”
“Racine” is not only a reference to roots. It is no accident that Harris, a playwright first and foremost, has named the agent of revenge in “Is God Is” after the French tragedian Jean Racine. The women of his dramatic œuvre are always split women; the inner division is because they are in love with the verboten, and love is an illness in Racine’s emotional world, for all intents and purposes. In “Phèdre,” the titular character hangs herself because she cannot shed her love for Hippolyte, the son of her husband, King Theseus. In “Bérénice,” the Queen of Palestine is heartbroken when her lover, Titus, the emperor of Rome, won’t abdicate the throne after his people refuse to accept a foreign queen. Jean Racine inscribed upon the scroll of his own life the rhythm of a tragedy, albeit an intellectual one. At the height of his career, he renounced the stage, taking a royal post as the hagiographer of Louis XIV, and devoted himself utterly to God. That is to say, the Church extinguished his art.
Ugliness, a Christian ugliness, is what makes “Is God Is” go. It is the disfigurement of God that plants the seed of revenge; it is the disfigurement of Anaia that makes Racine rage like Daddy. His act has bestowed on the girls a second sight, allowing them to see the world through the eyes of the spectacularly marginalized—those who, as the beatitude promises, will inherit the earth. The triumph of self-abjection serves as a soothing narrative hook in a certain species of female-survivorship tale. This is what Blitz Bazawule, the male director of the “Color Purple” musical-film adaptation, from 2023, did not understand when he performed a kind of castration on the text through his “decision” to delete Shug Avery’s awed appraisal of Celie, “You sho’ is ugly,” from his interpretation. To Bazawule, the through line of Celie’s perceived ugliness was like scum floating on soup, residue of a nastier era to be removed, and not at the heart of the question of desire, and of the urge to love and to be loved. ♦
