| Bundles starts with the tone of a dark comedy but moves into more of a crime drama. A little hard to peg down because it’s a story you’ve never seen quite like this. And that’s a good thing. Morgan (Yavonna Harris) is a dark-skinned Black girl getting bullied at school. When she’s finally had enough, she enlists the help of her sister Jackey and two friends Vick and Tiff. | | 2022
Directed by: Ryan Jordan, Jeffrey Leslie
Screenplay by: Maurice Hill
Starring: Yavonna Harris, Tanisha Cardwell, Naysa Young, and Alexis Jacqueline Smith
|
The four of them set out to teach Maria a lesson, by tasing her and then cutting her hair. The girls consider the best way to dispose of the hair without getting caught. And as any good entrepreneurial person can tell you, the best way to get rid of something is to make money off it. And good hair has value to it. As Vick in the movie tells us, and I’m definitely inclined to believe her, hair by gram is more valuable than marijuana.
These are four Black girls in Washington, D.C. None of them are well off but they each have their own ways on how to get by in this town; a town that has its fair share of violence and a town full people willing to change to try and move up the ladder of success. Black women paying top dollar for Brazilian hair dyed blonde, is such a perfect image for where we’re at in society. It’s a fun plot and Washington, D.C. is a perfect setting for it.
There is probably no demographic as hurt by the American patriarchal capitalist culture as much as Black women, so it’s nice to see them at the center of a movie and getting their piece of the American dollar. It’s a dark comedy because their capitalist venture definitely isn’t legal, and then when it turns dark and violent, it plays out more like a crime drama. But in its unique way.
Bundles is a low-budget indie movie, but I’m a fan of everything they pulled off here. The acting is overall very good, the story has an excellent structure even though it does move slowly at times. The dark lighting is problematic at times, but the movie is engaging and compelling enough that it’s not a deterrent. There are quite a few aerial shots of the city, but they work nicely as scene transitions, and the Capitol is really such a perfect image to backdrop this story of revenge, desperation, greed, friendship and about just finding a place where you belong in society.
|
