The Still Astonishing “Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.”

A still from Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.
Leslie Harris’s “Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.” evokes the myriad complexities of teen-age life.Photograph by Park Circus / Leslie Harris

Many of the best black American filmmakers of recent times—including Julie Dash, Zeinabu irene Davis, Wendell B. Harris, Jr., and Leslie Harris—burst into the cinemasphere with a first film of startling originality and have been denied the chance to make a second feature ever since. This Saturday, Leslie Harris’s only feature to date, “Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.,” from 1992, will be screening at Film Forum, in the series “Black Women: Trailblazing African American Actresses & Images, 1920–2001,” introduced by the filmmaker. (It’s also available to stream on several sites, including Amazon and iTunes.) The film’s artistry opens new paths that the industry at large, both mainstream and independent, thought best to leave unpursued. This stopped Harris’s directorial career cold, depriving viewers of her further imaginative insights and stifling in advance the actors and collaborators who’d have been launched along the way.

From the start, “Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.,” an independent film made on a very low budget (reportedly a hundred and thirty thousand dollars), is a polyphonic work of multiple voices and consciousnesses. Its protagonist, Chantel (Ariyan A. Johnson), is a junior in a Brooklyn high school—a black student in a school and a neighborhood where all of her classmates and all of her friends and acquaintances are black. She lives in a housing project with her parents and two younger brothers. Chantel’s parents work long hours—her mother’s on the day shift, her father on the night shift—so she’s responsible for getting her brothers up and off to school in the morning. Chantel herself works part-time at a food store (the scenes were filmed at the famous Zabar’s), and, noting the absurd luxuries that a high-handed and contemptuous white woman takes for granted, she accepts no guff from this customer and risks her job to push back at her. Chantel’s parents fight over money and struggle bitterly for it; her mother is denied a long-awaited promotion. Chantel is also an excellent student whose plan to attend college and become a doctor—an ambition that’s depicted as atypical in her circle of peers—has two motivations: for her to be of service to the community, and to make a good living without a “boss.”

Chantel’s intense practicality and focus is still that of a high-school junior—one who’s in a hurry in all sorts of ways. She wants to graduate a year early and get to college (and leave the neighborhood) all the faster; she also wants a social life, and struggles against her wary and protective parents for a bit of freedom. The pressures of her conflicts with her parents and also the stresses of her daily life break into drama when Chantel begins a relationship with a suave young man named Tyrone (Kevin Thigpen). She becomes pregnant and must decide whether to have an abortion. She also has to face the crisis of letting her parents, her peers, and her school know that she’s pregnant—and how she does so is the dramatic crux of the movie.

In the span of just a few minutes, Harris evokes the myriad complexities of teen-age life, and of the specifics of Chantel’s own life and states of mind. Chantel is bold, courageous, boastful, fragile, lucid, bewildered, brash, funny, vulnerable, exuberant, playful, and earnest—all in a handful of scenes that are marked by her direct address, her punctuation of dramatic sequences with first-person monologues into the camera. Her intense and serious emotion and breezy comedy, freewheeling excitement and acerbic cruelty, self-awareness and self-delusion tumble upon one another with a hectic clash of tones that evokes the whirling spectrum of Chantel’s emotional world. So too does Johnson’s performance, which ranges from skitlike and comedic to sharp-edged and smooth and furiously dramatic.

Yet Harris boldly displaces Chantel’s psychology from explanations to displays that find their correlates not only in Chantel’s own actions but in her experiences and observations. Whether it’s in Chantel’s confrontations with a white teacher who responds with hostility to her challenge to an educational system that has little to say about the African-American experience, her sparring with a sympathetic clinic counsellor (Chequita Jackson) who’s legally barred from discussing abortion, her reckoning with violence in the streets, or her clash with the school’s principal (Wendell Moore), society at large is an active participant in the movie’s drama and, above all, in the formation of Chantel’s inner life.

The characters she encounters in her dealings with institutions small and large are themselves double presences, displaying personal authority while also equally representing and conveying the power of the institutions within which they work. Though they’re plausible characters in realistic situations, they’re above all emblematic—reflections of Chantel’s inner life, amplifications and ramifications of her conflicts and confusions. Chantel’s knowledge is inseparable from power, as seen in school scenes or another sequence, both comedic and painful, in which she and two female friends discuss sexual matters with a misguided, or, rather, unguided confidence that reflects hearsay rather than education; it reflects all that they aren’t being told by parents or teachers or the media.

In effect, “Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.” is a documentary of subjectivity, an outward view of the inner life of a young black woman—of a person who, by the sheer fact of those three descriptors, is subjected to relations of power and of control, and faces conflicts of a political nature in the course of her daily life. Harris brings to the fore a character who’s no abstraction but has abstraction forced upon her, who, with her very identity (rather, identities), is born into conflict, is thrust into a public life and a symbolic role that reflects back into her sense of self and plays an integral part in the formation of her character. In spotlighting a protagonist who’s a young black woman, Harris is also spotlighting a society in which young black women aren’t considered, or allowed to be, the protagonists in their own stories. In lieu of a title card saying “The End,” Harris places one with the title of the film and an epigram that she signs in her own name: “A Film Hollywood Dared Not Do.” It turns out that even the independent-film community dared not do another film like it.