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| Bill Gunn and Seret Scott in Losing Ground |
A philosophy professor and her husband, a successful artist, lease a summer home in the country, where she tries to work on a paper about ecstatic experience and he is struck by the beauty of the countryside as well as the young Puerto Rican women in the neighborhood. Her discontent with the isolation and his flirtations leads to some reassessments of their marriage. This is the stuff of which New Yorker short stories are written, and writer-director Kathleen Collins makes her best of it. But did we mention that Sara Rogers (Seret Scott) and her husband, Victor (Bill Gunn), are Black? It's not something that Collins makes much of in the expected sense: They don't experience bigotry or discrimination in the course of the film. Collins, who was also Black, does something more deft with the fact: She keeps it present in the consciousness and the dialogue of the Rogerses, who seem to cling to the antiquated term "Negro" in ways that we don't expect from hip, educated people in the 1980s. Losing Ground is not about race, but it's informed by it in subtle ways. The film was made on a shoestring budget and sometimes shows it: The photography is sometimes murky and some of the acting a little amateurish. But its exploration of ideas and emotions is the product of keen observation and sharp writing. Collins died only a few years after the film was made, and didn't get to see it find an audience: The film played only at a few festivals and never received a theatrical release, but it was greeted with praise by critics after it was screened at a retrospective of Black films in 2015.
