Radha Blank is ‘The Forty-Year-Old Version’

There’s a certain disappearing act expected of women when we turn forty. We’re supposed to hang our heads with the apparent shame of ageing. We’re meant to lick our wounds, count our wrinkles and graciously fade into the background.

We are not, I repeat, we are certainly not supposed to find love and a new career as well as a rapper. In ‘The-Forty-Year-Old Version’ (2020), Radha Blank, the film’s writer, director and star, calls bullsh*t.

Having scooped the directorial prize at Sundance as she made a dazzling debut as director well into her 40’s, Blank is the black, middle-aged, plus-sized heroine she knew we all needed.

Though the film isn’t entirely autobiographical, Blank cribs liberally from her life. A real-life playwright who found some success in 2011 only to struggle to get any of her plays produced for almost a decade, the Radha on screen mirrors the Radha off it minus her gigs writing for shows such as ‘Empire’, ‘She’s Gotta Have It’ and ‘The Get Down’.

Within the world of ‘The Forty-Year-Old Version’, Radha was the next big thing 10 years ago. Now broke, avoiding her brother’s insistent requests for her to sort through her deceased mother’s belongings and with her under-30 accolades yellowing in a cramped Harlem apartment, Radha teaches playwrighting to a class of mouthy teens while her agent and best friend Archie (Peter Kim) tries to keep her career alive.

Like the Radha of real life, film Radha won’t compromise for the liberal white gatekeepers baying for poverty porn, tales of trauma or some version of faux woke tap dancing across the boards. Her integrity keeps Radha shut out from mainstream success but ten years of “no” wears her resolve thin as does the death of her mother and the looming 4-0 which also sets her on the path to reignite her once legendary teenage rhyming skills.

A soul-searching romantic comedy with a core of reinvention and rap as well as a homage to the black and white, New York-set films that inspired its aesthetic, ‘The Forty-Year-Old Version’ is the Big Apple from a rarely seen point of view shot moodily on 35mm.

Though the story is a relatively familiar one, in ‘The-Forty-Year-Old Version’ the apparent screw-up is black. She’s crafting a gutsy second life made of hip-hop and a younger love interest. She’s also dealing with issues of grief, rejection and integrity with all the self-deprecating comedy and bittersweet complexity afforded the mostly white male characters traditionally at the centre of films about angst and art in New York.

The effect is exhilarating and one can’t help but root for Radha in life and in cinema.

In a culture obsessed with “making it” before you’re 30, ‘The Forty-Year-Old Version’ is a coming of age story that says we come of age many times in our lives.

If we’re lucky, the decades keep rolling in and we’re free to roll with them; making whatever dreams we still harbour come true.

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