The Fast and the Colorful

Fast Color (2019) is a kind of film I’m just starting to recognize. It’s a “small” film, independently produced about someone with superpowers, but not a superhero film. It’s more grounded in character, and the lead characters are people of color. I’m thinking of Kin, Sleight, and maybe Midnight Special.

This one stars Gugu M’batha-Raw (Wrinkle in Time). We meet her coming out of an abandoned building, removing ropes from her wrists, and driving away into an America (or world?) where it hasn’t rained in seven years. At a diner, she meets a sympathetic man, Christopher Dunham, kind of an accountant type. She reluctantly takes a ride with him, and sure enough, he’s actually a government scientist, trying to bring her in for study. But she escapes and continues to make her way home.

For that is where she is headed - to see her mother (Lorraine Toussaint) and daughter (Saniyya Sidney) at their little Southwestern farm. Toussaint has a superpower - she can disassemble objects to dust and re-assemble them. The daughter can as well, but is still learning. M’batha-Raw, it turns out, has an anti-power - when she sleeps or loses control, it causes earthquakes. To skip ahead, when she was a teenager, she got in with a bad crowd, and got pregnant. She cleaned up for the child, but her seizures were a threat to her and she went away. Now she’s come back, sober and wanting to learn to control her powers. But will Toussaint forgive? What will her daughter think when she finds out this is her mother? And will they figure it out before the government gets there?

This synopsis might sound like a bit of an action film, or a dystopia, but that’s not how it plays. It’s about the three generations of black women more than anything else. A key scene shows them around the table, with young Sidney showing her power. She levitates a coffee cup and turns it into a whirling galaxy of dust. But as the camera circles the table, it stays focused on the faces of the women - the miracle is taking place at the top of the screen, almost out of view. Now, not all of the character stuff worked for me - I never felt like M’batha-Raw had a wild past, for instance. She seemed too together to be an ex-addict. Also, David Strathairn as sheriff doesn’t quite ring true to me.

But overall, this is a great film - the kind of mid-budget film everyone feels is missing these days. It also has a great song - “Germ Adolescents” by the X-Ray Spex. Wasn’t expecting 80s punk here!