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She’s Gotta Have It: why Spike Lee's sex-positive debut is a coming-of-age classic

The radical film was closer to French new wave than anything that had passed as ‘black’ cinema before – and it still resonates today

“I consider myself normal, whatever that means,” says Nola Darling, but she really isn’t. For one thing, she’s happily juggling three lovers. For another, she’s an African-American woman telling her own story in a movie.

What’s more, the heroine of Lee’s feature debut, played by Tracy Camilla Johns, is a confident, beautiful, independent, sex-positive woman. She seems to live the dream. She makes political collages in her loft apartment in pre-gentrification Brooklyn. Her candlelit bedchamber resembles a church altar, which is appropriate. It looks as if she’s got it all figured out.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HBaqF1

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