The 40-Year-Old Version (2020) - written by Iris Neuberg

Directed by Radha Blank imbd: 7,3/10

For whom do we create our art? In The 40-Year-Old Version we watch filmmaker Radha Blank asking herself and the audience that very question.

It is a complicated and layered question in the same way that it is a complicated and layered movie. Well, Radha Blank is that kind of storyteller. Not only did she write, direct and produce the movie, she also plays the main character whose name is, you guessed it Radha Blank. One might call this movie a semi-fictional autobiography. And as such, it is a masterpiece.

You might not be able to watch and comprehend the entire black-and-white-movie the first time around. But that’s okay. You should watch it twice and I will try to explain a few of the countless reasons why. Let’s start with the first keyword: striving.

Radha is a black woman from Harlem raised by artists who seems destined to become a big artist herself. The parallels between Radha, the character and Blank, the filmmaker are undeniable (e.g. both share the same first and last name, her parents art is portrayed in the movie, the character playing her brother is Blank’s real life brother, etc.).

However, the narrative keeps playing with your mind. You start to watch a movie that you think is about a 40-year-old screenplay writer who wants to become a big name in the industry. However, after Radha refuses to sell her script to a producer whose only intention is to sell a poverty porn about Harlem to rich, old, white people she decides to forget that she has bills to pay and throws her career over board by choking (yes CHOKING) that man. As proud as the act of choking a bigheaded, white supremacist may sound, we encounter Radha in the next scene crying on the floor, eating meat with her bare hands asking her dead mother what to do next.

Now the first act has ended and everything our protagonist wanted to achieve seems further away than at the beginning of the movie. Still she pursues her endeavors with an unmatched passion. After reaching rock bottom with seemingly nowhere else to go, Radha rediscovers her love for Hip Hop and we are welcomed to the second act. She starts a rap career. Another storyline that seems to be over before it even took off after stage fright overwhelmed her during her first live performance.

So, where do we go from here? Her irrepressible urge to be a successful artist leads us right to our next keyword: assimilation.

You remember the racist, bigheaded, poverty voyeur? He still wants to work with Radha. Therefore, with literally no other option she pedals back. In her case that means leaving her pride aside and blemishing her own work. It literally hurts to watch those scenes in which Radha agrees to the white producers’ changes in her story about the black experience in Harlem. At this point, we, the creative audience, ask ourselves the movie’s main questions:

What are we willing to sacrifice in order to become renowned artists? Into what kind of artists will those sacrifices make us evolve? How much of ourselves do we lose in the process? How will we know that we lost too much?

Moments of pain and pleasure will rotate in this movie, as Blank knows how to tell a story with a wink and a delicate joke whenever necessary. You will almost miss the underlying story, our third keyword: grief.

As aforementioned, Radha, the character and Blank, the creator share many similarities. In the movie, Radhas mother died one year prior. In real life the same thing happened to Blank a few years earlier. Radha is a grieving character that misses her late mother. There is a reason why you will not notice that right away: Because you are not supposed to.

Radha is a statement towards the portrait of black characters’ grief in movies. She rarely says it out loud, she rather walks around it. Still, she is suffering over the loss of her mother; she is just doing it outside the frame.

There is this expectation around black expression that does not allow silence or calmness. A black person suffers loudly, for everyone to notice. But you will hardly notice Radha’s suffering. You will not hear her grief. You will see it and you will feel it, if you watch close enough. Blank intentionally steps away from literalism in order to allow her character, her black character, to grief in a way that we never see in movies: Silently, within herself.

There are so many other aspects to discover within this 129-minute journey. At some point, it raises more questions than it answers, but that is alright. It is up to you to find your own answers to those questions.