In writer/director Dee Rees's genuinely felt feature debut, her teenage heroine is so hidden from the world that she can't even find herself. The film opens in a smoky, neon-streaked nightclub where a stripper undulates on a stage to the shouts and flung dollar bills of the women watching. Although Alike (Adepero Oduye) is ostensibly there to express herself in a way that she can't at school or in front of her church-going mother, she seems no more comfortable there than she does bottled up at the family dinner table. Rees's point isn't hard to cipher -- Alike's being closeted is about much more than her sexuality -- but she parses it with intelligent, feeling complexity in a film that could have covered itself in cliché.
Taking the bus back from the club with her tough, very out friend Laura (Pernell Walker, quietly amazing), Alike grows more tense the closer she gets to home. Changing from her baseball cap and jersey to a girlier outfit, she looks stuck, as though unable to decide which version of herself she prefers. At home, it's obvious that the daughter her mother (Kim Wayans) wants to have doesn't exist, and can't be shouted or made over into existence. Alike's flinty policeman father (Charles Parnell) is less harsh on her, but that's more likely because he's got secrets of his own and nits to pick with his controlling wife; he doesn't seem to want to be bothered to be a parent or a husband. Compared to this battlefield, high school for Alike seems to be a cinch.
Rees shoots Alike in reflections, pensive, head tucked down in a defensive crouch. Alike is so tied up in secrets and fright that even when a romantic opportunity is dropped into her lap, she's too petrified to respond. There's a similar stillness to the film as a whole, shot as it is in a sleepy, half-awake tone of out-of-focus backgrounds, lusty dreamscape reds, and dark shadows. There's a color scheme here that's a little too obvious for its own good, with Alike's home looking as though the light bill hasn't been paid, and her time with Laura being similarly light-challenged. Set against that darkness are the scenes where Alike and Bina (Aasha Davis) -- the seemingly goodie-goodie daughter of her mother's church friend that Alike's been forced to hang out with in order to straighten her out -- hang out, with sunlight all around. It's a romantic's conception, much like Alike's poetry.This is Brooklyn, but Rees doesn't make a big point of it, letting the bright brownstone-lined streets speak for themselves. (Though geography does provide the film's best line, when a man is mocked for never having left a two-mile radius of where he was born, he snaps back, "Hey man, I been to Poughkeepsie!") Rarely for an American film set in a black neighborhood, Pariah doesn't tie up the screen with crime and drug pathology. This doesn't seem to be a papering over of realities (the economic chasm between Alike's solidly middle-class family and the more streetwise Laura's rough, nearly orphaned existence is made clear), rather it's Rees wanting to tell her story on the characters' own terms. She doesn't want to swamp them in misery that's been forced on them by outside entities; just being honest to themselves is hard enough. There are shadows behind the shadows in Rees's film, and no guarantee that just being able to see through them will make things any clearer.
