Losing Ground

Another recent DVR watch was the 1982 film Losing Ground.

Seret Scott plays Sara a philosophy professor at a college in New York City. All of her students love her and tell her they really enjoyed taking her class. Interestingly, they also say that her husband must be lucky to have somebody like her for a wife. That's obviously a sign that things aren't going to be quite right at home for Sara.

Victor (Bill Gunn) is Sara's husband, and is an abstract artist by profession. They live in what looks like a combined apartment/art studio which frankly looks entirely too large for a professor/artist couple, but that's the movies for you. Victor, being an artist, is a bit of a free spirit, and while Sara isn't exactly strait-laced, she's definitely the more serious of the two, and you can tell it's the sort of thing that's led to a constant low-level tension between the two. Only now, it's bubbling up to the surface.

Victor gets the idea that it would be a change of pace to renew his creative juices if the two go upstate for the summer. Sara, however, wants to do academic research, and that's probably going to be difficult to do in a small-town library. Indeed, while doing that research, Sara has already met Duke (Duane Jones) an actor who has a past studying philosophy and is the uncle of one of Sara's former students George (Gary Boling). Anyhow, they compromise and go not that far north of New York to a town with a substantial Puerto Rican colony.

While there, Victor decides to start painting portraits, especially after running across Celia (Maritza Rivera) dancing to Puerto Rican music along the banks of the Hudson River. Meanwhile, Duke shows up here as well, and Sara gets a call from George asking if she would take a part in the student film he's making. She demurs at first, thinking that doing this sort of work for one of her former students might have some ethical problems, but eventually she accepts and finds that Duke is also in the movie. Tensions between Victor and Sara build.

Losing Ground is a movie that's notable mostly because of its provenance: its director, Kathleen Collins, was one of the first Black American women to direct a substantial feature film. That's both a blessing and a curse, I think. The movie probably wouldn't get any attention at all had it not been directed by a black woman, while I think it also has the effect of pigeonholing the movie as something of more a niche interest.

In fact, the themes in Losing Ground are universal and the idea of a couple trying to deal with the strains of being in a rut in their relationshp is well-explored movie fodder. Losing Ground fits in well and does a generally good job, although the limited budget does result in some flaws as Collins took on a bunch of roles besides director. Specifically, the movie could have used a few more sets of eyes to flesh out the script, which at times seems like it's leaving some empty spots.

One of the pluses is the location shooting. Although the couple talks about going "upstate", they really only go to Nyack, maybe 20 miles north of Manhattan and a good hour and a half south of me (and unlike people in New York City and much of America, I don't consider New York to be "upstate" until you get to the 518 area code). However, the Nyack of the movie looks so much like many of the other declining towns along the Hudson, like Newburgh or Kingston, or the Hudson that was used in Odds Against Tomorrow (the east side of the Hudson is gentrifying more than the west side, probably because New York City is on the east side of the river).

Losing Ground did get a DVD release, although it's pricey, probably because of the whole "first black woman director" thing. Still, I would definitely recommend the movie.