a-thousand-and-one-movie

A Thousand and One

A Thousand and One begins in 1994 and ends in the mid-2000s. It all takes place in New York City, covering the major cultural transition that beset Manhattan at the behest of then America’s Mayor, now national laughingstock Rudy Giuliani. Writer-director A.V. Rockwell keeps a steady hand on this theme; the consequences are shown frankly but never feel overwrought. For a feature debut, there is remarkable patience and care taken with every detail of this story. The foregrounded drama is about a mother named Inez (a tremendous Teyana Taylor) newly released from Rikers, looking to reunite with her son, Terry (played by Aaron Kingsley Adetola at first, but then played by older actors in later scenes). Terry is a ward of the state, but Inez thinks he should live with her. What follows is an emotional epic about the secret pacts we make to protect ourselves within hostile environments.

Rockwell’s novelistic approach to the material gives the film a heightened, ethereal quality. The swelling score by Gary Gunn adds the gravitas to match it. This hard-edged tale of a mother and son’s struggle to survive in a New York City determined to take them down finds new and surprising ways to affect you emotionally throughout, earning its tearjerking moments with ease. Singer and choreographer Teyana Taylor has been a staple in the music industry since 2005 (ironically, just after the events of this film take place), but A Thousand and One is her first major leading role in a film. Taylor’s performance here is brimming with emotional intensity and vulnerability. Covering Inez from her early twenties to her mid-thirties, Taylor never makes the obvious choice and never sanctifies Inez’s uneven decision-making. Part of A Thousand and One‘s brilliance is its refusal to label any of its characters as heroes or villains.

When Inez is released from Rikers in 1994, she hits the ground running trying to reignite her hair styling business by passing flyers out on the street to passersby and even stopped cars. When she sees Terry with friends at the local store, she tries to reacquaint herself with her young son, but he barely even registers her existence. She watches as he flounders in a foster home in Brooklyn that pays him little attention. When he ends up in the hospital with a head injury – he was trying to run away – Inez makes a fateful decision, take her son back and run away to her old home in Harlem. With phony birth certificates and social security cards, Inez can create a new life for her and Terry, raising a family on their terms, and outside the system dedicated to keeping them apart.

As the years go by, Inez and Terry go through several ups and downs. Inez reconnects with a former flame named Lucky (Will Catlett), a fellow ex-con who’s tempestuous, on-again-off-again relationship with Inez continues even after their marriage. Lucky fills in as a father figure, but frequently falls short as a role model, his own damaged past paying dividends in adulthood. As a girl-hungry adolescent (played by Aven Courtney) and later as a sensitive teenager (played by Josiah Cross), Terry is never fully confident that his life with Inez can sustain. He’s smart and gains acceptance into a specialized high school, but the secret of their lives hovers ominously over their existence threatening to end it at any moment. Add to that the changing demographics of Giuliani’s New York City, and the mother and son’s constructed world becomes more and more tenuous.

Rockwell’s parallel narrative – the micro of Inez and Terry’s survival, the macro of New York City’s gentrification – is an ingenious touch. It’s not simply a narrative trick, but a profound statement of how the two are inseparable from one another. The cruel policies of one affecting the dire circumstances of another. Rockwell has enjoyed success as a short filmmaker for over a decade, and the experience behind the camera shows here. Her sensitivity is grand but that doesn’t mean A Thousand and One doesn’t have many difficult things to say. The film mourns a different version of New York without glamorizing it, and it criticizes those who enact inhumanity while still understanding that these decisions are not made by one person alone. In this way, A Thousand and One tells a story that could be a tragedy, but finds the triumph within it, recognizing the seemingly small graces that improve our experience of this savage world.

This movie won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, an honor with an uneven reputation. This is one of the best winners in the category in a very long time, possessing both the spirit of independent film that Sundance champions while refraining from the treacly sentimentality that the festival is frequently associated with. That’s not to say that A Thousand and One doesn’t possess a strong emotional component. The film’s script understands the utilization of melodrama to enhance character, and when the film’s conclusion inspires tears (which it did for me, in great measure), it does so in a supremely satisfying way that doesn’t condemn its characters to sorrow nor cheat the reality of their lives. In this way, the melodrama reflects the actual drama of humanity.

Will Catlett’s performance as Lucky gives the film an important component: as a man whose choices don’t always live up to his ideals, his acceptance of Terry as a sensitive, intelligent young man plays against what you expect from a womanizer and a felon. Catlett plays both sides of Lucky’s character so naturally, fusing the man with a complication that Rockwell displays beautifully. As the oldest iteration of Terry, Josiah Cross has the largest emotional burden, including several monologues that could fluster a less talented actor, but Cross proves up to the challenge, matching Taylor in their domestic showdowns. But this film is a stand-out for Taylor, who proves to be a superlative performer and a genuine movie star. Rockwell opts not to rely on aging prosthetics in portraying a woman over the course of eleven years, but instead trusting her actress to create that passage of time in her performance. The decision is one of several strokes of brilliance throughout A Thousand and One, 2023’s first legitimate candidate for best film of the year.

 

Written and Directed by A.V. Rockwell