Thoughts on Love, Brooklyn

    At the Angelika Film Center on Monday, I saw Love, Brooklyn, a 2025 romantic comedy-drama directed by Rachael Abigail Holder, in her directorial debut, and written by Paul Zimmerman. The film centers on Roger (Andre Holland), a writer living near Prospect Park in Brooklyn, NY, and he is writing a piece on how gentrification has hurt Brooklyn, specifically with Black communities. He is close friends with his ex-girlfriend, Casey (Nicole Beharie), an art gallery owner who inherited her gallery building from her grandmother, and has been continually rejecting offers from a developer who has been buying buildings on the block, wanting to hold on to her building because of her heritage and as a Black business owner. Roger and Casey have a very playful, teasing friendship, often joshing around like kids in the park.

    Roger is casually dating Nicole (DeWanda Wise), a widowed mother of a young girl, Lorna (Cassandra Freeman) who lives in a Brooklyn brownstone, and whose husband died in an accident. She and Roger are cool with having a casual, friends with benefits relationship, but Roger isn't sure if he wants to be more serious with Nicole, and when Lorna who knows him as her mother's "friend," wants to get to know him, Nicole is trying to balance her own emotions with opening up a relationship between Roger and her daughter, while not wanting to hurt Lorna's feelings regarding the loss of her father.

    The film is beautifully shot, showing neighborhood scenes of Roger riding his bike down residential streets in Brooklyn, hanging out in front of a coffeeshop with his friend Alan (Roy Wood, Jr.), who is married and wants to live vicariously through Roger's single life as a bachelor. Alan is happily married and settled down as a middle-aged man, but likes the idea of an affair or having another woman be into him, but he turns down the possibilities that could lead to it, not wanting to actually blow up his life over an affair.

    The love triangle parts of the drama were decent, but I was more interested in learning more about Casey and Nicole's individual stories, as their own dramas were more compelling than about their feelings with Roger and his attraction towards both women. Casey is struggling with the pressure to sell her building, as well as mainly having one artist client that is keeping her in business, and when she tries calling Roger to talk about a difficult day he had, he's not up for listening at the moment, and Beharie plays it very well with the look of restrained frustration on her face, really wanting him to be a supportive friend, before being like "No, it's fine." Beharie has a lot of charisma and brightness as Casey's goofy self, and she's equally as good when she's playing the more subtle dramatic moments.

    I also wanted to know more about Nicole's inner life, as I felt like the film would just scratch the surface of her troubles as a single mom who is still mourning her husband, working multiple jobs to support her daughter, and juggling people's emotions. There is a fantastic scene in the finale when Roger comes to her after he's had a rough night, basically trying to crash at her home in the middle of the night, and she shuts him down for trying to use her for sex, saying she misses her husband every day, and standing her ground and not letting him take advantage of her. Wise is really great in that scene, and it made me want to know more about her character and not just being viewed as a FWB through Roger's eyes.

    Andre Holland was good, as he has soft eyes and a way of doing small gestures like scratching at his neck when he's nervous or hesitant, but I didn't find his character as compelling. I wasn't interested in his romantic drama, or that he kept struggling to write his piece on gentrification in Brooklyn, though I did like scenes that reflected the themes of the film, like when he and Casey are looking at a painting of Sodom and Gomorrah and the moral of leaving what you can't take with you. The film has an epilogue speech about loving your city and struggling with seeing it change, when it doesn't feel like your home anymore, and you can't hold onto the past, but that you can learn to love your city in the new shape its taken, and it can still have personal significance for you. That part really resonated with me a lot, as I lived in Astoria, Queens for 16 years and currently live in Jersey City, but still feel connected to Astoria as my longtime home, even if it's different than how it was when I was younger. The film had paralleled Roger's personal evolution with the evolution of his Brooklyn neighborhood, and it worked well together, more so with Casey's struggle with her own evolution.

    I thought the film was decent, that it could have had more depth with the script, but that the acting was all very good and the cinematography was gorgeous, so it was worthwhile to watch.

Thoughts on The Booksellers

     On Tubi, I watched The Booksellers, a 2019 documentary by D.W. Young, and executive produced by Parker Posey, about booksellers, rare book dealers, and archivists in New York City. The film mostly follows antiquarian and rare book dealers and their bookstores, as they collect and purchase books for large sums of money, having specific criteria like special autographs by the author (either to a fellow famous person or to a loved one in their life), an interesting dust jacket, or a prized first edition. They got their start working in used bookstores; following in their families' footsteps, or just falling into the career as nerdy collectors. 

    I found this film really fascinating, and as an archivist myself, I could relate to how much the book dealers and shop owners valued the archival history of the books, and wanting to preserve their legacies and support independent bookstores. As one person said, "We didn't call them independent bookstores back then, they were just bookstores."

    I did like when the film focused on people that weren't just the white middle-aged men who fit the stuffy, elitist book dealer stereotype, but spoke with Black archivists and librarians, like Kevin Young, a librarian at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem (who highlighted the James Baldwin archives at the library, like his personal notes on napkins or unfinished literary drafts), or Syreeta Gates, an archivist who collected hip-hop journalism from the 1990s, like from XXL and The Source, and, full disclosure, I briefly met a couple of times when I worked for the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in Harlem because she did some research work there as an archival fellow. Three sisters (Adina Cohen, Naomi Hample and Judith Lowry) run the Argosy Book Store, which is New York City's oldest independent bookstore, founded by their father Louis Cohen in 1925.

    The film felt very warm and cozy to watch, and I like watching people thrive in their fields nerding out over their passions, and seeing them in their bookstores and homes surrounded by books and having their own library system and figuring out what to do with their books after they die. I'm not as much of a collector, due to limited space and funds, nor am I interested in hunting for rare items like they are, like "digging for gold" as they would put it, but I can relate to the joy and enthusiasm that one would elicit from discovering these historical materials and maintaining them for posterity. It's a lovely movie, and I'm glad I checked it out.