In 1980, Bill Gunn, director of cult 70s horror Ganja & Hess, took on this quietly amazing micro-budget video project with author Ishmael Reed. It is an improvised melodrama in two parts about Black lives in New York, originally intended for television, and shot on analogue video. It is rough and ready, and the sound mix is sometimes very muddy indeed, but it pops with energy and life.
The film anticipates by decades the world of shooting movies on smartphones, even though they were presumably wielding camera equipment the size of a briefcase. Moreover, the opening titles to part one are so basic that they look like a modern intentionally VHS-fetishist gag by someone like Harmony Korine. You could also compare the boozy scenes and overlapping dialogue to Cassavetes or Altman. But for me, it all recalls Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm; there is genuine comedy in one scene in which a stern-faced hospital administrator in the emergency room asks an endless series of form-filling questions of a young man who has arrived in mortal agony, but can’t be treated until the bureaucracy is complete.
The story, though ramifying into all sorts of subplots and sidebars, revolves around a nurse at Harlem hospital called Johnnie-Mae (played by nonprofessional Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, a poet and food writer). In the opening scene, she is interviewed about her life and family background and interest in writing poetry; in this sequence, she is calm, articulate and strong in a way that she is never permitted to be once the eventful drama kicks off.
Johnnie-Mae is married to Charles, played by the film’s producer Walter Cotton, but is having an affair with jazz musician Raymon (played by Sam Waymon, brother of Nina Simone), a situation she reveals to two friends at a boozy, uproarious brunch. But idle, mopey Charles – whose main interest seems to be watching The Guns of Navarone on TV – is having an indiscretion of his own, something revealed so fleetingly that it seems like a dream someone is having. Johnnie-Mae is furious at having to share her cramped marital home with Charles’s rackety old dad, but then she also has to let her dodgy brother Bubba and his girlfriend Mary-Alice stay with them too; their criminal dealings mean they are dramatically arrested in the middle of the day while everyone else is out. Her relationship with Raymon deteriorates as he appears to become more famous and successful, and in the film’s second part, her father-in-law’s declining health means an explosive confrontation with Charles’s sister.
Where is it heading? Everywhere and nowhere. It is a slice of life. Two slices in fact. The film’s second half quickly recapitulates the action of the first before moving things on, an indication of the way it was intended for TV, but Personal Problems has neither the extended storytelling sensibility of longform television nor the enclosed narrative shape of a feature film. It just rolls past for two and a half hours, an experiment in open-ended performance made with experimental, pioneering flair.
• Personal Problems is in UK cinemas from 31 July.
