Fresh (Sean Nelson) is a 12 year-old drug carrier living in New York City.
Determined to save his older sister Nichole (N’Bushe Wright) and himself from their current circumstance, he enacts a scheme to play off his various employers against each other.
Sometimes you watch a movie and it leads to other movies.
Recently I have been bingeing Spike Lee’s movies and after Mo’ Better Blues, I was curious to check out other black filmmakers and films from the wave of the nineties. I made my way through John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood, Ernest Dickerson’s Juice, the Hughes Brothers’ Menace II Society and F. Gary Gray’s Friday.
I threw in Waiting to Exhale and Soul Food to provide some reprieve, and expand my knowledge of nineties black cinema.
I wanted to front porch this review a bit because that context played a big role in my viewing.
This might be unintentional but watching all these movies chronologically, Fresh feels like these films are calcifying as a genre - with set expectations and recurring elements.
Those films featured crime, drugs and violence, but these elements were contextualised within more specific stories about characters’ lives in their communities, with deeper messages about racism and other systemic inequalities in America.
Unlike a film like Boyz n the Hood, Fresh feels more like a genre movie.
Genre, in both terms of how it feels like the film is reusing elements of earlier ‘hood’ movies, and how it uses a familiar narrative template - Fresh’s plan is basically a version of Red Harvest/Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars.
As such it lacks the same sense of verisimilitude and unpredictability as those earlier films. Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society do not fit familiar story structures, and not as concerned with plot as with the interior struggles of their characters.
Fresh is tense and it packs some surprises, but it feels more traditional in structure, and in the way it builds to the conclusion.
There are some moments of violence which - coming on the heels of Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society - feel like the filmmakers are trying to match the brutality of those past films. One act in particular, involving an animal, feels unnecessary and cruel.
Because the film’s narrative beats are familiar, the violence also fits into the film’s dramatic structure in a way that feels more inevitable and expected.
While the focus on a twelve-year-old makes it unique, there is a version of this movie where Fresh could have been an adult, and I am not sure it would affect the story that much.
Still, Fresh is a good picture - Nelson is terrific in the lead, and the Red Harvest-style plotting is exciting. The young actor’s performance is so self-assured that the complex manoeuvrings of the third act do not feel implausible.
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