Tramaine Raphael Gray | Becoming / 2023

good family vibes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tramaine Raphael Gray (screenwriter and director) Becoming / 2023 [24 minutes]

 

A black young man Shawn is openly gay to his family, and although regularly abused on the school playground and elsewhere, he is supported and protected to a certain extent by his older brother Rashad.

     But on this particular day when Rashad and his friend pull Shawn away from the bullies’ blows, the elder brother seems stand-offish and a bit irritated by his younger’s brother dilemmas. This time he has confronted some boys who were giving his female a friend a hard time, and as Rashad’s friend notes, when they turned the attack on him, calling him faggot, he at least held his own until they got there.

     Shawn expresses his love and appreciation to Rashad, but he doesn’t answer, simply telling his brother to run upstairs and fix his eye and face up before meeting with their mother.

     In fact, their mother, upon discovering that her son has again been attacked, is more than consoling as she tends to his eye. She’s protective and reassuring. When the father returns home, we witness the whole family as a sort of wondrous unit who give their full and unconditional love to one another, accepting each other’s differences and helping to protect each member of the family. Wouldn’t all wish to have such percipient brothers and parents?

     When Shawn expresses the fact that Rashad has been distant and unfriendly, the father, after suggesting that he will have to take the matter up directly with his brother, also explains that he comprehends what the problem may be, that perhaps Rashad has his own personal difficulties to which Shawn is not being sensitive.

     Indeed, without the movie actually explaining it, it’s clear that Rashad finds it difficult to constantly be on the defense for a brother who is so sexually different from himself. Although he has been there for his brother, it has often been translated into a form of hard love that has made Rashad feel that he has not simply been “accepted.”

      Rashad attempts to explain that he envies his younger brother for being a dreamer, while he has stopped dreaming and is chained to reality filled with pain and uncertainty

      But the brothers do come together and realize their love for one another.

      Unfortunately, to give evidence of it, film moves the direction of what one might almost describe as being an inspirational statement in the manner of “alternative” and “new wave” theology, preaching the philosophy of unconditional love in a rather simplistic manner (“sometimes love is not what one says, but what one does.”)  When Rashad says the only dream he has is of “freedom,” Shawn demands his brother close his eyes, the chorus swells up with lovely sounds, and the screen fills with white and purple clouds, as the boys, sitting back-to-back, let their heads fall to one another’s shoulder as they imaginatively fly off with “a love that becomes freedom.” And for the film’s last five or six minutes we are greeted with a view of planet swirled with yellow, white, and purple streaks while singers weave their voices in and out in a melodious riff about drifting free.

     Although it’s been done so often to become almost a cliché, it might still have been far more interesting to go back in time and discover how this supportive family dealt with Shawn’s original revelation and how Rashad first determined that he would devote much of his time to protecting his younger sibling. At this point in time, the film seems more an advertisement for the continuation of good family vibes.

 

Los Angeles, October 17, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).