Rachael Abigail Holder Believes Love, Brooklyn is Radical

Just eight minutes into Rachael Abigail Holder’s directorial feature debut; Love, Brooklyn, the basis of the story spelt out to us.

It is woven into a single post coital interaction between Andre Holland’s Roger and DeWanda Wise’s Nicole. Still reeling from orgasmic bliss, she says to him “The chemistry is really good, sexually”.

Andre Holland and DeWanda Wise in Love, Brooklyn

Roger smiles in that way men do when their egos are caressed. Then she retrieves him from La La Land by following up the compliment with “But I’m still not your girlfriend”. Roger pulls back, a little confused, a little hurt, “What is that supposed to mean?” he asks. “You know what it means” she replies. “But who’s asking?” he fires back. Anyone one who has done the tango of modern dating knows what exactly this is; a situationship.

Love, Brooklyn is a story about modern dating, the toppling and tumbling but the

presence of black people at the helm of it makes it in Holder’s words “radical”.

Love, Brooklyn follows the lives of Roger (Andre Holland) who is suffering from a writer’s

block, Kacey (Nicole Beharie) an art curator who is on the verge of losing her gallery and Nicole (DeWanda Wise) a widow bearing the brunt of grief.

Together they make the love triangle the film is hinged on. “I wanted to make something radical” Holder tells me on a Monday afternoon. “Radical” might seem far too reaching for a story on modern dating but when you take into account that black people are not often given opportunities to participate in modern dating as we know it on screen, the radical nature of this act becomes apparent. Because at its core, radicalism challenges systems, calling for drastic social and political reforms.

Therefore, this story could be described as radical.

Representation of blackness on screen is often shown through a devaluing or dehumanizing lens, summing our existence into one word; trauma. Portrayals of black love are scarce in mainstream Hollywood and on rare occasions we are presented with black love, it is marred by dysfunctionality.

Holder resists this narrative with Love, Brooklyn by creating a black man who strays from the “norm”. “I wanted to see a love story with a black man who’s soft and light on his feet” she affirms.

This was also her elevator pitch to the Moonlight actor. “When I was pitching it to him, I told him the world was ready to see him fall in love and be soft. ‘The world wants to see you fall in love’” she told him. While Holland has struggled with definitions of black masculinity in previous films, this is the first romantic comedy we get to see him fall and stay in love.

With raw vulnerability Andre Holland embodies Roger who is refreshingly different in the way

black men are shown in media. Yes, he is stuck in a love triangle but the script resists the urge to brand him a philanderer. Instead, he is shown as an honest man who is conflicted, stuck between a budding relationship and a past one—this conflict mirrors his outlook on the fast-changing Brooklyn.

His love-stricken stagnancy is not born out of deceit but a confusion and uncertainty that feels all too familiar to people in the dating arena. He is not a neatly written character; he is a character that carries the complexities that comes with being human. “He is not an asshole. He is not a jerk because he still has some work to do. I saw him as a human being. The characters are all a bit unsure, they’re spinning, trying to find their footing.” Holder defends.

Vulnerability is a thread that runs through the entire story; the withholding of it, the granting of

it. This antonym existing side by side is important to Holder as she aims to show the spectrum of emotions as black people.

In one of the more vulnerable scenes, Kacey calls Roger on the brink of tears in search of companionship. “You can see she just wants a friend. That is the kind of softness you tend to see with white female characters” she says.

This is juxtaposed with Nicole’s unwillingness to relinquish her shields till the last moment, “We can exist in many ways, we are not a monolith” she explains.

Nicole Beharie and Andre Holland

While, Love, Brooklyn is Holder’s debut, there had been other stories she had eyed but couldn’t make because she requested that black characters be at the centre of non-traumatic stories.

Her ethos has always been to show black people in a light that allows for their humanisation. “As a filmmaker, I want to tell stories about sensitive Black people who cry and feel, in life not tragic or saccharine.” Thus, when she was handed the screenplay by Paul Zimmerman, a white man, she pictured black people.

Black people wrestling with love, tinkering with it, stumbling through it, falling and picking themselves up. “I can be really specific with how I see people, how they love, hide from love and ultimately show up for it. I want to show the soft parts of the people who look like me. I want to show the sensitive bits that show up, not when we are in danger or inferior but when we are in love.” She concludes.

In a DEI averse industry where brown and black faces are becoming less and less, the slow-

paced romantic comedy stands as a beacon of hope. It excels at situating black love as social

resistance because it presents black people as full-fledged-human beings rather than statistics.

Black love is indeed a form of radicalism.