Set It Off
In the early and mid 1990s, there were a whole spate of "ghetto movies," all of them sad and fierce stories featuring young black people (Juice, Boyz n the Hood, New Jack City, Menace II Society). Or, rather, featuring young black men. For the most part (and yes, there are some exceptions), these films included women only as mamas and hos. They were rarely full characters, but rather set pieces to enhance the lives of the young men on whom the films focused. In 1996, Friday director F. Gary Gray offered an antidote to this oversight in the form of Set it Off, a film about four young black women from the Los Angeles projects. Who rob banks.
Set It Off has the potential to be a great movie. The cast, with Jada Pinkett (not yet Smith), Kimberly Elise, Vivica A. Fox, and Queen Latifah in the major roles and small parts by Blair Underwood and John C. McGinley, is fantastic. The premise, that maybe women are trapped by racism and poverty and driven to violent and criminal acts too, is a long-time coming. And it's always fun to watch women rob banks. But the movie is sadly stilted, terribly written (Takashi Bufford, responsible also for Booty Call), and misses its calling as a heroine content classic.
But it's still worth watching. Like Bad Girls, part of what works for me about Set It Off is that it focuses on friendship between women. While there are romantic relationships in it (most notably that between Pinkett-Smith's character, Stony, and corporate banker Keith, but also that between Queen Latifah's Cleo and her girlfriend, Ursula), they take a clear backseat to the primary relationships, which are between the four friends.
I was also impressed with the non-stereotypical portrayal of the four women. Only one of the women is a mother. They all have jobs and none are on welfare. One is the provider for her teenage brother. One is a lesbian (and she is the only one who seems to be in a long-term relationship). With one unpleasant exception at the beginning of the film, none of them are shown selling their bodies or being abused by men. Though the women in the film are definitely suffering under systematic oppression, and they recognize it, they aren't written off as "oppressed women." Their problems are about being women, yes, but also about being black, and being poor, just like everyone else in their community, regardless of gender.
I just wish they were better criminals! I wanted to see this group of women become very successful professional bank robbers, rather than pulling only a few botched-up jobs. Other than Cleo's fairly professional-looking car thefts, none of the women seem very competent as robbers. This irritates me from the gender perspective, and also because it just makes the film feel kind of dumb.
A final thing that should be noted about Set It Off is that Queen Latifah's character, Cleo, is an out lesbian. She and her girlfriend, Ursula, are the only real "couple" in the film. Made the same year as mainstream lesbian film Bound, Set It Off presents Cleo in a much less exploitative way than the characters in Bound. You get the sense that Cleo is a lesbian for her own enjoyment, not for the (male) viewer's. I'm for that. I just wish the filmmakers had the good sense to treat her partner, Ursula, the same way. But they don't. Of all the women in the film, Ursula is the only one who is treated much like black women are often treated in movies--as ass-bearing, short-short wearing, non-speaking eye candy. She's shown dancing in a thong teddy and rubbing herself against the hood of a car. Even if it's for Queen Latifah's gaze and not a man's, that shit still doesn't sit real well with me.
Set it Off earns three stars, because it treats its main female characters so well and provides a response to the very male-centric 90s film concern with the ghetto. It doesn't get four, however, because Ursula is so badly done, and because dammit, I wanted to see these women and this plot be something great, rather than something half-assed.
