‘All’s fair in love and basketball...’
I love cinema, I really do. The amount of hours that I spend watching the films is ridiculous enough but then you factor in the time it takes to research and write these endless blogs and it really does become all-consuming. Love & Basketball is another film I’ve seen, I guess. I mostly enjoyed it. And now here comes 500 or so words about it. And the days tick by…
Monica (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy (Omar Epps) have a lifelong friendship based on a mutual love of basketball and a spark between them that can’t be denied. Gina Prince-Bythewood’s decades-spanning sports drama charts the lives of two people and their families against the backdrop of a love for the game.
I loved the writing here. Prince Bythewood’s heartfelt screenplay smacks of authenticity and never strays into sentimentality or cliche. Lathan and Epps are both great, both delivering subtle performances in a film that often feels more like a great episode of a prestige TV show rather than a feature-length film (and I genuinely mean that as a compliment). This isn’t a sports film. Not really. Instead, it’s a character study that doesn’t just show how sports can be so important in our lives but also the more important question of why? What do people get from the basketball court or the football pitch that they don’t get elsewhere in life? It’s a complicated question and one that is touched on again and again throughout Love & Basketball.
I write this in a fairly despondent mood (is this a fucking diary entry now? Apologies), and yet even in a state in which I pretty much let this film wash over me, there were still sparks of magic that broke through. That’s the power of cinema and I guess that is why I keep going back to the well. On to the next one.