![]() ![]() Meanwhile, scenes from Alike’s high school and the lives of her mother, Audrey ( Kim Wayans) and father, Arthur ( Charles Parnell) reveal the unique struggles of being an LGBTQ teenager in the African American community, as Alike tries to figure things out and deal with the social pressure put on and reinforced by her parents. Her more experienced and outgoing friend Laura ( Pernell Walker) takes her to gay clubs and introduces her to the lesbian social scene where Alike experiments with her aesthetic, usually settling for hair pulled under a hat and baggy clothes. Pariah features the spellbinding Adepero Udoye in her breakout role as Alike (pronounced ah-LEE-kay, though she’s also called just Lee), a 17-year-old girl who starts to explore her identity as a lesbian. ![]() ![]() I’m embarrassed it took so long for me to watch it. The only initial impression I got was from the poster photo of a teenage African American girl looking at her reflection in a bus window, so I assumed some introspective themes about identity were a given-but aside from that, almost everything about this movie surprised me. I’d first heard of Dee Rees’ Pariah in 2011 when it premiered at Sundance, but I didn’t get around to seeing it (or even finding out what it really was) until last week.
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