Medicine for Melancholy

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Medicine for Melancholy is a film directed by Barry Jenkins and features Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Higgins as two people who recover from a one-night stand, only to follow-up with a day of exploration through various parts of San Francisco while reflecting the dichotomy between the city and their identities as black Americans.

Micah is a preternaturally chill native San Franciscan who feels increasingly alienated as the city rapidly gentrifies. “Imagine the Lower Haight filled with nothing but black folk and white artists,” he tells Jo, his would-be lover, about his long-gone San Fran. (It’s become the least black of America’s major cities.) Jo, wary at first but charming over time, is a transplant who doesn’t see the world in Micah’s specifically racialized terms, and it’s implied by the relative sizes of their living spaces that she occupies a higher position in the economic food chain. Both though, are black people partaking in a social milieu where Negroes are rarities. None of this tension is anywhere near as didactic as it may sound; these issues come up intermittently in the course of the pair walking and biking around, making each other laugh and generally feeling each other out.

I have always yearned for some poetic reflection on the state of San Francisco, the city I grew up in, as it has grown and morphed into a somewhat placated upper middle class of families. As a result, what has been born is a group of tweens, teens, and young adults, all searching for something greater in a city that seems to be innoculated with the rising cost of quaint comfort. Searching for identity, love, and reason may just be as hard to find in San Francisco as it is finding a decent and affordable place to live.

Via Racialicious.