The Forty-Year-Old Version

— Somehow I missed “The Forty-Year-Old Version” when it showed up a few months ago, but I’m glad I finally watched it. It’s a semi-autobiographical story about a black playwright in the midst of a dry spell and having some kind of middle age crisis, perhaps compounded by her mother’s death a year earlier. It’s hard enough to depict the complex nature of creative issues in a film but it looks easy in Radha Blanks' deft hands. It also manages to be flat out funny at times, with scenes that are nearly absurd but oh so believable, following the main character as she copes with a shifting pallet of cultural differences, gender identities, and age disparities. It raises the kinds of questions we all struggle with as we grow, change, get older, compromise, succeed, fail, and find our place. A Facebook friend of mine put this in her list of top films for 2020 and I can easily see why. I’m nearly certain it would make my list too. [Netflix streaming.]

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[2020. 123 min. Written and directed by Radha Blank. Starring Radha Blank, Peter Kim, and Oswin Benjamin.]
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-forty-year-old-version-2020