*All images courtesy of IMDB
When I hear the song In A Sentimental Mood—my world stops. I’m seven years old and things are easy. I have never met grief or depression, and my mom still smiles every time she sees me. She’s my definition of fun, the strongest person I know, and my hero. In those four minutes and fifteen seconds of the Duke Ellington and John Coltrane classic, I’m also transported into my mom’s favorite movie, Love Jones, where the song serves as a vital part of the soundtrack.
I’m now in my 20s, and while recently revisiting the film, I realized my mom was in her 20s in my memories. Age has become a mirror image that informs how I see the movie, my mother, and a pathway to forgiveness.
Writer and director Theodore Witcher’s love jones is a late 90s ode to Black expression, romance, and heartbreak told through lovelorn artists Nina Mosley (Nia Long), a photographer, and Darius Lovehall (Larenz Tate), a poet and aspiring author. Whenever I asked my mom what makes love jones her favorite she would name something different— the music, the story, the humor, or how fine Larenz Tate is. Over time, it came to mean just as much to me for similar reasons, although…I was also ogling Nia Long. Something about the moody melancholy of its Windy City backdrop and genuine leather-clad characters exudes mid-autumn, so I like to imagine it's set during the Midwest holiday, Sweetest Day.
Our charismatic leads meet at The Sanctuary, a mecca for Black creatives in Chicago. Within seconds of meeting, Darius impetuously performs A Blues for Nina—a poem where he begs to be “the blues in her left thigh” (full disclosure: this would’ve worked on me.) His arrogance does not impress our girl, who is newly single and at a crossroads after leaving her fiance. Still, their love blossoms as love jones is a tale of wanting, second chances, and artistic expression.
Complicated mother-daughter paradigms aren’t original and my relationship with my mom is best summarized as astrologically compromised. The air and earth incompatibility is not talked about enough! We have always had difficulty communicating, and without really noticing, we forged our bond through impromptu museum dates for her art history class, singing in the car, and Blockbuster nights. My mom never cared about the movie rating system, allowing her to share art with my older sister and me without censorship. Nearly every night, we made popcorn and chose a movie, and if my sister and I couldn’t agree on one, my mom defaulted to love jones.
In love jones sharing a love for art is enough to fall in love and come back together, reminding them of their connection even during times of conflict. When Nina and Darius meet for the second time at a music shop, he plays her a Charlie Parker record and speaks to her without even knowing. Those same wordless conversations existed between my mom and me, a language that thrived on quality time. As I got older, there wasn’t a need to spend time with my mom the way we used to, and without realizing it, we began to lose our only way to hear each other. In my teenage angst, this didn’t register as a loss, but as a symptom of independence.
Our connection now is somewhat obligatory, holding us together for the sake of what we are to each other.
As I rewatched love jones at 24, in all its romantic melancholy, I thought a lot about my mom. Not as my mom– but as a 20-something hopeless romantic waiting to be swept away and the implications it had on our relationship. Like my mom and me, Nina and Darius are imperfect— and they know it. They spend more time at odds than they do in love, yet the viewer never questions whether their connection is genuine. The film’s romanticism of second chances and finally getting it right alludes to a girlish optimism I never expected my mother to have. I never thought of love as something she had given up by becoming a mom, and for a long time, I don’t think she felt that way either.
In the last ten years, she saw her girls become everything she’d hoped for, so when her second chance at love came along she fell head first. She missed the signs, forgotten what she taught her daughters, (made me a proud big sister), and sacrificed everything she’d done for a reiteration of her past disguised as a worthy partner. Similarly, Nina pauses things with Darius to potentially rekindle a relationship with her ex-fiance, squandering new romance for an idea of love. Believing in something you’ve never known or seen up close could be poetic. It could be a second chance at something you always wanted. It could also be a lie.
The truth is emotions, love, and relationships—of all kinds—are uncharted waters for everyone. Like Darius, I’ve tried to use my words to mend the relationship between me and my mom, writing countless letters with each ending in subtle dismissals more final than the last. I want my mom to take accountability for how her toxic relationship affected the final years of my childhood. She prefers to let time heal wounds that are generations old.
The most recent instance made it clear to me—to be misunderstood is to be made invisible, to die a small death, and to crumble at the feet of those we love most.
Through my own womanhood, I understand now, that when I became a teenager, my mom saw her freedom. She wanted to be her own woman, not someone to depend on, but someone to be loved. As her child, I deserved more and the weight of her mistake fills the space between us. It’s easy to forget that we exist outside our roles as mothers and daughters and that these personhoods conflict with who we are and who we want to be for others.
When I was younger, I loved what my mom loved because I wanted to be like her. As I grew up, I found my own sense of self, but the countless love jones rewatches weaved our experiences together. My favorite song is a derivative of her favorite movie and the love I have for her. Like Nina moving to New York without saying goodbye, I’m not sure if telling her this would change anything. Would she come running like Darius for the train and be too late? For the four of us expectations and paths to forgiveness are collateral in the shadow of our emotional language barrier.
In the final scene outside The Sanctuary, with Nina and Darius washing away the past in the rain, they can forgive each other earnestly for their faults, reminding us to love in spite of. While art may no longer be enough to fill the gap between us, it will forever remind me of being seven years old with my mom—and our relationship— forever frozen as she was at that time. Sometimes I wish things with my mom were simpler, that there wasn’t a chasm between us she pretends not to notice. But to wish for simplicity is to wish we were different people, and I couldn’t dream of a mom I love more.
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