Be Glad That You Are Free: On Nina Simone, Miles Ahead, Lemonade, Lauryn Hill and Prince
By: Max S. Gordon
Tags: Music, Nina Simone, Film, Politics, Beyonce

1

I’m thinking on Nina — marveling at her, really — and what it took to make that woman. Cynthia Mort, the director of the recently released film Nina, felt the need to create a fictitious story based on the life of the artist Nina Simone. Her decision is confounding when one considers that the true details of Nina’s life are so much richer than Mort’s lie.

2

I’d originally planned to write about Nina and Lauryn Hill after the 2016 Grammys telecast, but I had an episode of “black madness”. Black madness is a form of depression specific to African-Americans and relates to what is happening with race in this country. One may contend that many white people are mad too, which is certainly a subject worth exploring. Black madness, however, can be located in the constant frustration one feels that America, at the most profound level, hasn’t changed enough to make a positive difference in the majority of black lives and possibly never will, and what that means for oneself, one’s countrymen and -women, and one’s children. The term micro-aggression has become popular to describe “minor” oppressive acts that take place in society every day. But when you’re on the receiving end of it, it’s all just aggression. Black madness is a response to living a life constantly subjected to violence — psychic, physical, social, political.

For those of us who find depression shameful, we may call this “feeling overwhelmed”. We may feel this all the time. Understanding and exploring my own black madness helps me better understand Lauryn Hill’s reported refusal to show up to the Grammys, or Kanye West’s perpetual and very public meltdowns. Azealia Banks, who in the past has been articulate about the pain of cultural appropriation and racism in the music industry, has been suspended from twitter because of her abusive tirades. A friend on Facebook is angry because a journalist puts Prince, Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston in a similar category, as if there were no connection between their deaths. But I think there is a conversation to be had about the black artist, racism, mental illness, addiction, and pain. When I think about Lauryn, Azealia and Kanye in particular, I am fascinated by their reactions to their art and their fame, and the overall experience of being black and an artist in America for this generation.

My own black madness flairs up at the announcement that Cynthia Mort’s film based on the life of Nina Simone has arrived in theaters after years of controversy over Zoe Saldana’s wearing blackface for the part. Don Cheadle announces in interviews that in order to get his film on Miles Davis made, he had to write a white character into the script. It takes a little black girl writing President Obama a letter for him to travel to Flint, a glorified publicity stunt, as the water crisis there continues. (He should have stayed home and just sent her new pipes.) He is welcomed with open arms, but he seems dissociated, comedic, as if he has no idea how grave the situation is, as if Flint were just a bad dream we are all having. The water remains undrinkable, toxic. Watching his press conference, one suspects that the only black life that truly matters to him is his own.

And finally, the Treasury Department has announced that in four years Harriet Tubman, our black Moses and shining revolutionary hero, who defied a system that valued black human life only as property, who led over three hundred people to freedom — never caught! — will now be the new face, captured, on U.S. twenty-dollar bills. I remind myself that Harriet isn’t in this, that her work stands by itself and that she “won”, even when it feels spiritually as if a slavemaster is somewhere having the last laugh. In other news, George Zimmerman attempts to auction off the gun he used to kill Trayvon Martin.

Blacks certainly don’t have the monopoly on madness. There is “queer madness”, of course. A man I met just the other day at the gym, a journalist, shared with me the survivor’s guilt he still feels over the deaths of his friends during the AIDS crisis in the Eighties. After attending a funeral every week for months, he shut down, then broke down. I turn on the television and the news reports the deaths of two transgender women of color killed within a forty-eight hour period. Their murders make for sensational TV, but are they properly grieved? Can you grieve what you never claimed? State lawmakers continue to pass legislation that says that women and men in the transgender community aren’t human — not even deserving to use the bathroom with dignity.

“Gender madness” may arise from watching men, usually Republican and white, arguing about abortion and overturning Roe Vs. Wade, a decision that will have dire consequences for all women, but most specifically poor women of color. The hardliners, smug in TV interviews, pride themselves on being political purists for the “unborn”, anti-choice even in cases of incest and rape. Women still make less money than men. Posters for the upcoming adventure/fantasy movie X-Men: Apocalpyse show a male character choking a female half his size, his hand gripped around her throat as she holds his arm, head back, pleading for release. They are at subway entrances and outside movie theaters throughout the city, seen by thousands of children. Writer and activist Stacy Parker Le Melle wryly observes, “Just another day in New York where you see an ad with a woman getting choked. But she’s blue and from a comic book so it’s okay.”

We barely recognize our “class madness”; stepping over the homeless person in the street on our way to our second five-dollar cup of coffee, and irritated, not because of the social injustice that surrounds us, but because we are late for work. Homelessness is just another political “issue”, until you yourself are walking those mean streets. A man I know was living in shelters for months last year and didn’t tell any of our friends because he was simply too ashamed.

And then there is a special madness for all of us that flares up around election times. I’m addicted to watching the news about the presidential race, as Donald Trump moves closer to the presidency. As a child of the Seventies, I can’t help but feel that my generation was supposed to be different — kinder, braver, smarter. An American man admittedly too long in my own extended post-adolescence, I’m looking for adults, real adults on the political landscape, and the man who may next lead our country is an overgrown child, throwing his toys and shaking his fist, bullying everyone on the playground. He is profane, arrogant, narcissistic, seemingly unstoppable, and adept at social media. He calls for a temporary ban on all Muslims entering the United States while the newly elected mayor of London is a Muslim man. Trump now claims the ban was only a “suggestion”, but his suggestion has already led to greater violence and hatred towards Muslim-Americans. There is no way to reconcile the insanity we live with now.

Republican candidates shake their bibles in my face and threaten to take away my civil rights as a gay man while a famous athlete loses a multi-million dollar endorsement for saying that homosexuals are “worse” than animals and should be killed. ISIS executes a 14-year-old boy for the crime of listening to pop music, which may be their code for gay, as they hurl gay men off buildings to their deaths, upholding what they claim is “religious law”. When and how did masculinity, East and West, get so out of hand on the planet? Where do these men come from, who makes them, and what is happening all over the world to our beautiful boys?

I think about their hatred for me, the politician’s promise, the preacher’s frown. I’ve never seriously considered hurling myself in front of a train or bus, but I have been self-destructive, negligent with myself, sometimes dangerously so. I have had friends who have been institutionalized or who have institutionalized themselves; and then there are the suicide attempts that are uncomfortable to talk about so you talk about movies or politics instead; the friend who admitted recently that if it weren’t for his younger brother and the shame it would bring to his living relatives, he would have killed himself years ago. And the slow deaths: the untreated addictions. And the even slower deaths, lives marking time, not feeling worthy enough to pursue a lifelong dream, or choosing to isolate, upholding impossible standards of perfection in the hope of one day being perfect enough just to breathe. A life constricted by shame — perfection finally realized one day in the best damn casket money can buy.

Someone will read this who may be an artist, who understands what it means to walk out the front door and deal with all the madness of the world — black, queer, gender and class. Yet she wills herself to create. And despite a desire to self-destruct, or to take a gun and destroy, she instead finds the generosity to say “Good Morning” to passersby. Or perhaps she starts a movement.

3

In March of 2015, I went to see Lauryn Hill in concert. She was playing a few blocks from where I live in Harlem. A friend of mine and I had just had a conversation about who the Nina Simone of our generation was, and we agreed on Lauryn Hill. Lauryn, at times and arguably more than any artist alive, has Nina’s greatness, her pain, the erratic reputation, her political consciousness, and her fearlessness. And, as with Nina, when people are impatient with Lauryn or exasperated with her choices, they use a cruel shorthand: she’s crazy. And she’s been to jail.

After a few uneven performances on her come-back tour, an article by Stephan Schumaker in 2014 was titled “It’s Time To Finally Stop Caring About Lauryn Hill”, and concluded, “She used to be great. I used to love her. Not anymore.” (Lauryn was in the news last week for purportedly arriving two and a half hours late to her amphitheater show in Atlanta. Because of the strict curfew, the show was less than forty minutes long.) Schumaker’s arguments about Lauryn’s behavior at concerts, her familial pressures, meltdowns and disappointed audiences were persuasive, but as with Nina and her “black madness”, I also knew there was more to the story. I knew if I went to see Lauryn that, because of her relationship to her art and her integrity as an artist, she would move me. The venue was small, and I wondered if maybe she was feeling vulnerable and wanted her audience closer to her. If the concert happened at all, there would be the possibility of the kind of magic that can only come from a genius, no matter how disturbed that genius may be. And I was in need of healing. I had to be there.

On the night of the performance, the line moved fairly quickly and I was inside, in a space that seemed more suited for experimental theater than for a performance by a multi-Grammy-award-winning singer and, for some, a legend. The stage was simple — a modest bench for the performer, with colored lights that melded the stage seamlessly with the seats in the audience. There was a concession area for drinks and food, and people had already secured all the tables near the front. I found a place to stand in the back as the room filled, and waited for the show to begin.

Perusing the room, I saw an advertisement for a movie which Lauryn was involved in, a documentary called Concerning Violence and inspired by Frantz Fanon’s Black Faces, White Masks with “narration by Ms. Lauryn Hill”. Just as I thought “I’ll have to check that out sometime”, a screen rolled down in front of us. I imagined that we were going to be shown a preview. The room filled with the sound of a plane or helicopter, rapid gunfire, chaos, and Lauryn’s familiar voice: “Colonialism is not a thinking machine. Nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state. And it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” I thought of Nina, wanting to pick up a gun after the murder of Medgar Evers and the 1964 bombing in Birmingham, Alabama that killed black four girls, writing “Mississippi Goddam” instead. I gave Lauryn credit — this wasn’t the usual opening to a pop star’s concert. Five minutes passed, then ten, and it became clear, as I observed the stricken faces around me, that we were being shown the full length, ninety-minute film.

Trapped in Lauryn’s audience and willing an out-of-body experience, I thought of fan loyalty and recalled seeing Sly Stone in concert in 2007, in Bournemouth, England. I was in London at the time and saw an advertisement in the Tube station that said Sly and The Family Stone were playing at the coastal town. Truthfully, I would have gone to the moon to see Sly, if only to hear “If You Want Me To Stay” sung live. (I’ve argued before that I feel it may be one of the greatest examples in history of the black American blues song.) So the following weekend, my partner and I got into the car, drove to the coast, and went to the concert. The venue was no bigger, it seemed, than a high-school auditorium, there were no seats to speak of, and we stood for two and a half hours through two opening acts, waiting for the show to begin.

When they finally arrived, The Family Stone was definitely ready to give us a good time, but Sly was a mess, rushing from one end of the stage to the other, with a manic grin on his face. He disappeared during songs, returning again only moments before they were over. His rendition of “If You Want Me To Stay” was inaudible, which destroyed me, and at one point, Sly went backstage, returned with that same grin, and threw a handful of grapes at the crowd. One ricocheted off the head of my neighbor, an unsmiling white man in a blue suit. (That grape might have been strategic; he looked like an entertainment lawyer.) Sly, a wizened shadow of his former self in a baseball cap, resembled a traumatized parakeet in a house fire, and he was throwing grapes. And this was my idol.

When the concert ended, despite wild applause from the audience, I heard some grumbles and cries for refunds aimed at Sly. I knew I should have been outraged by his behavior, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t squeeze out any hate for him. I’d just seen Sly Stone, the man who wrote the dark, beautiful masterpiece “There’s A Riot Going On.” And even if he was a disaster that night, the love in his music, what he had created, what it meant in my life, and hearing it live — “I Want To Take You Higher”, “Stand” and “Hot Fun in the Summertime” — was overpowering for me.

I tried to extend the same love to Lauryn, but I had a few reservations. While I enjoy Lauryn’s music greatly and admire her artistry, I’ve also, at times, been a reluctant fan, not entirely sure where I fit in as a gay man with what I sometimes suspect is an underlying fundamentalism — religious or political — in her ideology. It was this ideology that I questioned now, as her film ground on.

Lauryn’s movie recalled one of those outdated films we used to watch in grade school, the kind that came in cans, fed into film projectors on rainy days. And Lauryn’s audience responded in kind; there were titters, gasps and outright laughter, like an unruly class with a substitute teacher. Lauryn’s voice was narrating over images that looked to be forty or fifty years old — old film stock suggesting 1960’s National Geographic magazines; from the dusty exteriors and huts we were to assume we were in “Africa”. The specific details are fuzzy, but you know the kind of thing: Black mothers with sagging breasts carrying baskets on their heads; old men chewing on twigs and staring into oblivion because they are “noble” and “wise” and not just bored; someone with a spear stabs a cow for absolutely no reason; a group of handsome village men stand around in loincloths chatting about tribal concerns and you’re not supposed to be aroused by the one with the biggest “cloth” because this is “educational”; and a blonde woman with a British or South African accent tells an interviewer that she’d like to change her colonialist ways but it’s hard when you’ve been used to “a certain way of life.”

Something important was obviously going on, but it was the wrong time, the wrong place. The audience around me, black and sassy, started making jokes like, “Lauryn, you really LOST ONE here, girl,” and “I’m being MISEDUCATED right now, Ms. Hill.” A white woman next to me turned and said to my rowdy group in desperation, “Please be quiet! This is important and you might learn something.” I wish one of us had said, “We’re learning something right now about colonization, being told to shut up by a white person on 135th Street in Harlem.”

The film finally ended, and an advertisement flashed with a picture of a can of Coca-Cola and popcorn, reminding us not to forget to use our American Express card at the snack bar. I considered the irony of this and thought about black madness and Lauryn’s complicated relationship with the music industry. I understand the purity of what she wants to give us, the truth she is telling us in songs like “Black Rage”. And yet the reality for her, and why she may choose to sabotage her career, is that the music business and the Grammys themselves are just so much junk food at the snack bar — paid for with an American Express card.

A DJ played for another hour, and after a few people left in frustration or to relieve a babysitter, Lauryn finally appeared, and suddenly my irritation and the pain in my tired legs evaporated. Like Nina, Lauryn was in full control, constantly monitoring the sounds levels, precise in what she wanted from her band. The way she was positioned on the stage, with her fox wrap around her neck, her shiny diamond earrings, ruby lipstick and short afro, she looked like a glamorous black woman waiting for the bus during the Civil Rights Movement.

But what I will always remember from that night was Lauryn singing “To Zion”. There was a space near the back and a black woman began dancing. No one was dancing with her, but that didn’t seem to matter. She embraced herself, enraptured by the warmth of the sound, singing every lyric in her own private reverie. I looked at her body, and thought, We don’t usually see women this size dancing in public. There was no apology in her movements, no self-consciousness whatsoever. Lauryn was singing her song, and in the dusky blue lights that surrounded her, she was indeed a wonder — it was as if nothing in that moment could harm her. I could only speculate from what I observed, but it seemed to me that Lauryn’s music had the power to bring some black women to a place of joy they’d known as girls, and yet was, at the same time, a complete fulfillment of adult black womanhood.

That’s when I realized that I forgave Lauryn for the movie and the waiting, and understood that nothing was more important than what she was able to create in that moment for us with her music: sanctuary. There were several women in the audience who were also moved, and although they couldn’t dance freely, they held their heads back, eyes closed, singing with Lauryn, as if they all shared a common anthem. Maybe all her “difficulties” were worth it if it brought us to this place. On some level, Lauryn must have understood her own black madness, as she sang, “I Gotta Find Peace of Mind”. I thought of the stereotype of the crazy black female, of Nina, and a world of media images and male comics who found humor in portrayals of black women as angry, combative, aggressive, mean — of what it meant always to have to fight back to survive; fighting for everyone, including the men who condemn you, and then being punished for it. How you just get tired. In the intimate space Lauryn created, that burden seemed, at least for a few hours, lifted. One woman didn’t sing along, but kept brushing away tears with the edge of her hand. I watched the nodding heads and knew that I recognized this tableau from somewhere: it was the same look on the women’s faces in a college auditorium filled with black students where Nina performed “Young, Gifted and Black”. It was the relief that comes from finally being heard, the expansion of having your story told, and told right. In that moment I realized Lauryn was, is, our Nina, and that an artist who is true to her vision can save lives.

4

Cynthia Mort’s Nina, as anticipated, arrives in theaters an unmitigated disaster. One leaves the film not wanting to review it, but rather to request an autopsy. While no one can reverse what happened, it is still important to document it, to unpack it thoroughly so that, one hopes, it never happens again.

My suspicion is that while everyone involved may have had a niggling sense during filming that something wasn’t quite right, they barreled through anyway, led by an extraordinary sense of entitlement or collective self-deception. Eventually, and with the help of social media’s reaction, the immensity of what had occurred finally seeped in. Mort, outraged over the final cut after a protracted legal battle with the film’s producers, asked that her name be taken off the film. But even if there exists somewhere a cut that varies from the one I saw, it is impossible for the company to have shaped a new film from what wasn’t already there. In other words, Mort is fully responsible for what is on the screen, and will hopefully be haunted by her creation for as long as audiences have to experience Zoe Saldana as a singing Tootsie-Roll called Nina.

Saldana, an American actress, is Puerto Rican and black with light skin. She made comments about her racial identity, prior to accepting the role of Nina, in an interview she gave to BET in 2013, where she expressed her frustration at being labeled or put in a box because of race. “I literally run away from people that use words like ethnic. It’s preposterous! To me there is no such thing as people of color ’cause in reality people aren’t white.” Watching her performance in Mort’s film, I felt that Saldana was working something out psychologically by getting into “black drag”, the way actors are encouraged to mine their psychological fields in Strasberg’s Method, or therapy groups where one sits across from an empty chair and yells at “Mom”. At one point in the movie Saldana screamed, “I am a black woman, motherfucker!” or something similar. A couple next to me in the theater stood up and left.

The problem is that playing Nina isn’t on-the-job training. It requires the skill of a titan, especially with a script as lacking in nuance as Mort’s. Mort was also co-writer and director of the Jody Foster vehicle, 2007’s The Brave One. I had a visceral reaction towards that vigilante film, found it morally dubious and thoroughly despised it. When you look up The Brave One, Wikipedia cross-references Bernhard Goetz, Death Wish, and Eye for an Eye. (I don’t want Nina in this woman’s hands!)

Nina as a film isn’t unlike The Iron Lady, and for many reasons which will not all be enumerated here, Lady is comparably offensive. Whatever one thinks of Margaret Thatcher, the movie isn’t about a woman who reaches great heights in government and rules (or bullies) a nation, but rather the story of an old woman whose reality is crumbling because of her dementia. The film is cowardly for what it leaves out — only in brief moments do we see the consequences of Thatcher’s policies, or her authority on the world stage. It is an apolitical movie and ultimately an ugly one; determined not to offend anyone by revealing its subject, it becomes only a showcase for Meryl Streep’s riveting impersonation. Thatcher spends most of the movie “interacting” with her deceased husband, Denis. A similar movie about any man in politics — a film about Gerald Ford, for example, in which he spent most of his screen time pacing the floor over his wife’s alcoholism — would be laughed off the screen.

But The Iron Lady did have Meryl Streep, and Nina needs a great actress to inhabit the role, an actress bold and experienced enough to push the script aside and to tell the director, “Just stay out of my way and turn the camera on when I’m ready. I’ve got this.” Viola Davis has this kind of talent and might have told us more about Nina’s life by walking across the stage and sitting down at a piano than the entirety of Mort’s script ever could. Zoe Saldana gives the role the ol’ college try, but someone has dropped her into an ocean with sharks, and where we need an Olympic swimmer, she’s dog-paddling in water-wings. Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone is like Sarah Michelle Gellar as Margaret Thatcher.

Zoe might have had a minor triumph in a meditation on Nina, perhaps a stage play called Four Women, in which she could have played one aspect of Nina’s experience, a young Nina fighting to be respected in the industry. It has been revealed by a close confidant of Nina’s that, when asked who she believed could play her in a film, she said, “Grace Kelly”. It is clear from this that Nina either had a great sense of humor or, as I prefer to believe, was open to an archetypal and not necessarily a literal interpretation of her life. (Nina was as regal, private, and lonely at times as Kelly was.) Perhaps a talented writer and director could realize this impressionistic “I’m Every Woman” take on Nina.

But there is also something to be said, in fact insisted on, for a dark-skinned actress, and, if possible, an actual musician and singer, to inhabit this role. Nina, for those of us who feel that her music still sustains us through persecutions, is a crowning achievement in American artistry and black American radical consciousness. Her blackness was hard-won — she fought for it every day of her life — and is deeper and more profound than a prosthetic nose and fudge-colored foundation.

Instead of enhancing her performance, the make-up is a fortress surrounding Saldana, and most actresses, even ones with great abilities, might find it near impossible to project any emotion from behind it. What is offensive is that the make-up is so thick that it portrays Nina as a black female Frankenstein. (My partner, watching the performance through his fingers, said, “This is a horror film.”)

Saldana is not Dustin Hoffman’s Dorothy Michaels in Tootsie, who, in make-up, dress and heels was still human and vulnerable. In Mort’s hands, Nina Simone belongs in the theater of the grotesque. Certain roles call for extensive transformations: John Hurt in The Elephant Man, Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull, Charlize Theron in Monster, Eric Stolz as Rocky Dennis in Mask, Cicely Tyson’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman. These performances are emotionally nuanced: the make-up and transformations enhance, inform. Ten minutes into Nina, however, I thought of Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire. I could never completely surrender to that film because the make-up seemed porcine and oppressive, and I kept thinking, “How can Robin Williams breath under there?” But you don’t need to surrender to Mrs. Doubtfire in the way that you should in a film about Nina Simone. Scenes that should play for pathos are upstaged by an audience’s unsettled curiosity: “How did they keep that make-up from coming off in the pool scene?” Or as one reviewer commented: “Is she going to get make-up on those sheets?” Nina’s music becomes an afterthought, her life reduced to spectacle, as she is dragged again through the marketplace, on display at the carnival, a Hottentot Venus. There is a precedent for Mort’s violation.

Supporting characters, of which there are few, are of little help. From the sumptuous feast that was Nina’s life and legend, Mort chooses to serve us one singular dish, and it’s corn: Nina, after a hospitalization, asks her nurse, Clifton Henderson, to come and live with her in France. There is the suggestion of an unrequited May-December romance, but finally, through his help and loving care, Clifton helps Nina make a successful comeback.

Clifton Henderson, the “love interest” in Nina was, by all accounts I’ve read, a gay man, and while he is loyal to Nina in the film, there were questions about the real Henderson as a caretaker, questions related to neglect and financial mismanagement. It is highly suspect that this particular area of Nina’s life and this specific character would be the emphasis of her cinematic biography — someone whom history recalls as merely a footnote. David Oyelowo does the best that he can with what he’s given, but Clifton Henderson is a non-role. Filmed in 2012 before Ava DuVernay’s Selma, Oyelowo plays his scenes as if he has his cell phone on in his pocket, waiting for the agent to confirm he’ll be playing Martin Luther King. Mike Epps is Richard Pryor for about five minutes of screen time, and tells us how hard life is with multiple sclerosis after having burned himself up by freebasing cocaine. Nothing else is revealed about his character, and the scene ends. The script was written by Google. In another scene, we are introduced to New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award-winning playwright Lorraine Hansberry. She sits beside Nina’s piano, encouraging Nina to write “Young, Gifted and Black”, even though the song was written as a tribute to Hansberry’s memory many years after her death. No-one has done her homework. A scene in which Nina is supposed to be playing a “Woodstock” -type crowd in the 1960s, ends up looking like a rained-out church picnic.

If you didn’t know Nina before the movie you would think she got to the top of industry playing auto shows — not Carnegie Hall. Finally, the film feels as if it were made by someone to whom Nina owed money when she died. She would never have stood for this slovenliness in her own work, which demands the question: can just anyone just grab a pen or start typing a screenplay and write about an artist’s life? Whom does Nina belong to, and who has a right to claim her? Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in his piece “On Nina Simone’s Face, Zoe Saldana and the Realities of Blackness” for The Atlantic: “We are talking about people who think it is fine to profit off her music while heedlessly contributing to the kind of pain that brought that music into being…Today a young Nina Simone would have a hard time being cast in her own biopic.”

Making films is risky. Sometimes creative people honestly miscalculate — look at M. Night Shyamalan’s career — but rarely on this grand a scale. I’d love to see Mort issue an apology, but perhaps she’s not sorry at all, and somewhere she secretly feels vindicated, believing her intentions were pure and her producers failed her. An article on Buzzfeed by Kate Aurthur about the film claims that Mort actually met Nina personally. My question to Mort would be, “If you weren’t sure whether your script was racist, why didn’t you bother to find out? When the family begged you not to do this movie, did you consider their reasons why? What in Nina’s story did you feel you needed to tell so urgently, that all other practical and aesthetic considerations were discarded along the way? And ultimately, did you love her? Did you love her? I know you chose her, Cynthia, but would Nina have chosen you?”