Four desperate women commit a series of bank robberies as the only way to escape the American system.

Ever since childhood, Stony, Cleo, Frankie and Tisean have been best friends, but the American Dream has passed them by. Frankie is the ambitious bank clerk, who seems to have made it by dint of hard work. But all of a sudden she finds she is worth nothing to her bank.

Stony puts all her energies into sending her brother to college in order to change the course of her own life. With no scholarship her family has no chance of studying in their country; all Stony needs she hopes to get in the form of an advance payment from her boss, and so she becomes his mistress. But Stony's dream is also destined to come to nothing.

Tisean also works hard, but as a cleaner has never found a way out. As a single mother on a low income she is forced once in a while to take her child with her to work. Although four pairs of eyes keep a careful watch on the boy, he still manages to swallow an unhealthy quantity of cleaning fluid. Tisean has to prove that she has enough money on her bank account for a baby-sitter by the date of the trial, or else she will be forced to give up the child.

As a black lesbian, Cleo has long since said farewell to North American society. With nothing more to lose, it is she who suggests a bank robbery as the solution to their problems. Another deceptive idea...

With their documentary on communist film makers in 1950's America, Red Hollywood, Thom Anderson and Noël Burch were, according to their own definition, ecstatic. People who are driven not by greed, but by the system, to prostitution and crime, the main characters being women, and African Americans at that, and one is a lesbian.

For Queer View's hitherto European perspective, this is not enough for us to celebrate Set It Off as a communist milestone, but we are still very enthusiastic about the film's structure.

Audiences should certainly not make the mistake of expecting to be confronted in depth with a different story of African American women than those they had in Waiting to Exhale. Blair Underwood, who took on the most important male role in Set It Off, may have been right when he said, "You have four ladies, and they're not waiting to exhale – they're exhaling throughout the whole movie." But the makers of Set It Off were unable to disguise the fact that this is, first and foremost, an action film, even if it does take more time than is usual over the characters and background, and cannot be totally written off as a drama. Vivica A. Fox, who plays Frankie, is more accurate when she says, "There's a lot to this story – action, adventure, death, turmoil, even love." And the film makers do admit to staging hold-ups of a kind never seen before.

The same cannot really be said for the women's stories, as they are not explored in any real depth. But all criticism aside, the whole is handled in such a way as to make this an enjoyable action film, and not just in those scenes that go with a bang. When did we last see anything like this? Even the romance does not appear obligatory, but as a part of the whole.

For technical presentation, Set It Off must be praised: the use of sound and the ever-present, never-dominating music creates a rich atmosphere.

ki, Berlin
translation: andrew
photo ©: Constantin Film

Seen during the:
47th Berlin International Film Festival Berlin

Queer Watchlion

Deutsche Version

Filmdata

Soundtrack (in German only)

Another movie by director F. Gary Gray: Friday