(2010) Based on Ntozake Shange's play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, director/writer/producer Tyler Perry's powerful opera of pain and poetry and precious intensity, lyrical with lament to rhythms of resentment, brings together eight women and their traumatic experiences. They have suffered physical and verbal abuse, abandonment, infidelity, infection, infanticide, rape, abortion, and attempted suicide. Each, representative of a color, has an aria.

On the 5th floor of a walkup in Harlem, Tangie (Thandie Newton, orange) has the reputation of a tramp for bringing home men night after night (though she believes she's taking control of men by using her sexuality freely, picking and discarding them as she chooses): "I survive on intimacy…. Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet."

Across the hall Crystal (Kimberly Elise, brown) resides with her two little children and live-in boyfriend (since she was 14) Beau Willie (Michael Ealy), an abusive unemployed alcoholic (damaged from military service), who rudely dismisses a child-welfare agent, Kelly (Kerry Washington, blue), following up on a report of child endangerment. The apartment manager, the sagacious Gilda (Phylicia Rashad), who's seen it all before ("I used to be you") and babysits for Crystal, reported the abuse.

Below them lives Juanita Sims (Loretta Devine), a nurse, frustrated with her in-and-out, off-and-on lover ("I brought you what joy I found") Frank (Richard Lawson), whose comings and goings repeatedly confound the advice she dispenses to women about relationships with men.

Begging for more money, Alice (Whoopi Goldberg, white) in her albescent garb of religious fanaticism comes to her older daughter Tangie, who pays her mother's rent from the money her father left her: "He only left you that money, so you could control me like he did." After her mother's been denied, Nyla (Tessa Thompson, purple), the younger teenage daughter and dance student with a college scholarship, goes to Tangie, asking for $300 to cover her "college application fees," but Tangie only rebukes her for wanting the money for an abortion.

Nyla's dance teacher, Yasmine (Anika Noni Rose, yellow), after going out to a restaurant for dinner with Bill (Khalil Kain), a seemingly decent young gentleman, invites him over for a home-cooked evening meal: "A rapist doesn't have to be a stranger to be legitimate. Someone you never saw. A man with obvious problems. But if you been public with him, danced one dance, kissed him goodbye lightly with a closed mouth, pressing charges will be as hard as keeping your legs closed while five fools try and run a train on you. These men friends of ours, who smile nicely, take you out to dinner, then lock the door behind you..."

While the sizzling meat unattended on the stove burns, the hard-driving magazine publisher Joanna (Janet Jackson, red) with her stockbroker husband Carl (Omari Hardwick) attend an opera (his way of apologizing for appropriating $200,000 from their account without telling her into an investment: "Save your 'sorry.' One thing I don't need are anymore apologies. I got sorry greeting me at the front door. You can keep yours. I don't know what to do with them... I have to throw some away. I can't even get to the clothes in my closet for all the sorries"), though Carl's attention drifts to a young man in the audience.

As an assistant at the magazine to her tyrannical older sister Jo, Crystal takes further abuse. Kelly with her sensitive and supportive cop husband Donald (Hill Harper) is informed by a physician that because of an STD infection earlier in her life she can't bear children.

"Colored girls have no right to sorrow," says a distraught Juanita: "Ever since I realized there was someone called a colored girl, or an evil woman, a bitch, or a nag, I've been trying not to be that, and leave bitterness in someone else's cup." After a hard rain, out peeks the sun with colors washed in tears forming a rainbow.

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Copyright © 2011 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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