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A bittersweet drama on a familiar theme - the frictions forced to the surface
during a Christmas family get-together - Michael Abbensetts' Black Christmas is
an understated and affecting study of relationships, unexpressed pain and a
tormented nostalgia for a distant home.
The drama begins with a picture of domestic happiness and racial harmony, as
mother Gertrude is assisted by her white neighbour, Lily, in preparing a
traditional West Indian black cake. But the idyllic Christmas that Gertrude
wishes for with childlike anticipation seems a remote dream in what follows.
Gertrude's attempts to ensure the perfect Christmas are challenged by her
troubled and uncooperative family: husband Bertie, a good-humoured but idle
armchair philosopher, full of empty observations about life, peppered with
half-understood vocabulary gleaned from his thesaurus, but blind and indifferent
to the pain of those closest to him; daughter Renee, bitter and unhappy despite
her educational and career success, and burdened with an unwanted pregnancy;
brother Herman, a shameless womaniser with a penchant for 'white chicks', whose
shallow charm barely disguises a cruel selfishness, and his bundle-of-nerves
wife, Dolly, whose only solace lies in her Bible and her memories of the
kinships she left behind in the West Indies.
Directed with subtle sensitivity by Stephen Frears, Black Christmas largely
avoids overt racial messages - the only white character is Lily, who is clearly
relaxed and comfortable with this black family, and who is a reluctant subject
of Herman's predatory desires - but the feeling of living in an unwelcoming
society is conveyed by the uniform diet of bland white 'family entertainment'
offered by the ever-on television set.
Stronger is the sense that something important has been lost in leaving
behind old ways: Dolly complains that "West Indians don't care about any of us
like we used to back home", while Bertie wonders, without much concern, whether
"the capitalists have taken the Christ out of Christmas". To Gertrude, though,
such wistful nostalgia is pointless - as she says, in the drama's most
tragicomic line, "England to me now is home - I grin and bear it." In the end, it
is Gertrude whose force of will somehow transcends the bickering and self-pity.
Her insistence that the family abandon the television and unite for a
'sing-song' (her choice, with heavy irony, is 'Silent Night') seems finally to
win for this ramshackle family a glimmer of hope for unity and
happiness.
Mark Duguid
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1. Christmas Eve (2:29)
