Director Dee Rees Cements Her Soft Style in Bessie With Queen Latifah

I refer to Latifah as brave because in one scene, she bares it all, literally. Sitting in front of a mirror, Latifah is butt ball naked while peeling off the last remnants of her stage dress, down to her eyelashes. In the moment, she doesn’t say anything really, instead Latifah as Bessie sings to herself, breast reduction on full display, depicting that underneath all of the fame, glamour and talent, she is a weary woman who just wants love that she can’t find despite having a husband, girlfriend, boyfriend and innumerable adoring fans. This is the beauty of Rees’ talent both as a director and screenwriter—she wrote the script for Bessie as well as Pariah—the pauses and things she instructs her actors not to say but rather show.

“I really wanted to let Bessie speak for herself, so I started with her songbook. Everything about these women was written in the third person, and my whole thing was getting it in the first person,” Rees told the LA Times. “I was definitely not interested in a white man’s perspective on Bessie. I wanted to hear it from Bessie’s lyrics and Ma’s lyrics who they were. And Angela Davis’ book, “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism,” that was like my bible.”

Rees says that she wrote this screenplay around the arc of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey’s relationship, two strong women in show business who made their own fortunes, loved women and maintained their friendship. But the story’s strength is that while Bessie is bisexual, and brashly so with both her husband and girlfriend living under the same roof, it’s not a point of discussion. Instead Rees uses Bessie’s polyamory to demonstrate her insatiable need for love that she didn’t get it from her mother, who died young, nor her sister Viola who raised her and her siblings. Again, what’s not said is the loudest in Rees’ writing.

Rees’s style is also about action, casual and direct. For example, in the first few minutes of Bessie, the star is punched by a man because she didn’t want to sleep with him in an alley after some heavy petting. But instead of cowering, crying or getting angry, she picks up a glass shard and stabs him before teasingly saying, “It was just getting good to me!” The viewer knows immediately, ‘Oh, Bessie was wild.’ Later when the Blues woman first meets her future husband-manager Jack Gee, I dare say it’s the best part of the script.

“Auditions for the show are over,” Bessie says to Jack in her hotel room with Clarence standing aside.

“I ain’t auditioning for no show, I’m auditioning to be your man,” Jack says.

“You look a lil’ small …” she replies.

“Baby, I’m built for speed,” he declares.

The lines are so good I couldn’t help but laugh for a good five minutes straight.

Rees also used the film’s colors to reflect where Bessie was in her life.

“I wanted every element to tell the story, the production design, the wardrobe. The color palette changes from monochrome to excess, to gold to flashy colors, colors not from nature to pastels,” Rees told HBO. “With the camera language we wanted it to mimic Bessie’s movements in the world.”

If I’m honest, I can’t say that Bessie moved me as much as Pariah did in its final scene alone—be warned, you will be reduced to deep sobs if your heart beats at all—but I am glad to see another black woman at the director’s table who is making it her business to tell unapologetically black stories like those of Bessie and Pariah’s Alike. We are the better for it.

Image via HBO and Getty.