Powerful, Reggae-Saturated ‘Queen’ a Portrait of Survival

What’s a single mother to do?

A family friend, who’s been helping to support her and her two children for years, is beginning to put the make on her 15-year-old daughter. A vicious thug so covets the space where she works as a street vendor he stabs to death her younger brother’s best friend before their eyes.

Dropping in a nightclub for a brief escape from her problems, Audrey Reid’s indomitable Marcia hits upon a solution: continue to work by day but at night prepare to win the lucrative title of Dancehall Queen of Kingston, Jamaica. As a melodrama Don Letts and Rick Elgood’s “Dancehall Queen”--the highest-grossing film in Jamaican history--is shamelessly contrived and casually constructed, but as mythology it’s a powerful celebration of strong, poor women everywhere who survive and prevail by a combination of courage and cleverness.

It’s fun to see Marcia transform herself from a plainly dressed working woman looking older than her 30 years into a sexpot dancer draped in sequins, feathers, elaborate makeup, wigs and little else. As entertainment the reggae-saturated “Dancehall Queen” is infectious, and it is held together by the sheer force of Reid’s personality and presence.

“Dancehall Queen” recalls a number of the talkies made by pioneer African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux--and also the popular cinema of India--in that in depicting life’s hardships it offers periodic respite from them in the form of exuberant singing and dancing interludes. (The film’s grittiest moment occurs early on when Marcia actually tells her daughter to submit to the “protector’s” passes; she hasn’t yet thought up an alternative.)

“Dancehall Queen,” which could use some occasional English subtitles to translate the Jamaican dialect, may strike you as by and large as improbable as a fairy tale, but it reflects the realities of the shantytown life of Kingston.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: It includes strong language, violence, considerable sensuality.

‘Dancehall Queen’

Audrey Reid: Marcia

Carl Davis: “Uncle” Larry

Pauline Stone-Myrie: Mrs. Gordon

A Polygram release of an Island Pictures presentation of an Island Jamaica Films production. Directors Don Letts, Rick Elgood. Producers Carolyn Pfeiffer, Carl Bradshaw. Executive producers Chris Blackwell, Dan Genetti. Screenplay by Suzanne Fenn, Ed Wallace, Don Letts; based on an idea of Ed Wallace and Carl Bradshaw. Cinematographer Louis Mulvey. Editor Suzanne Fenn. Music supervisor Maxine Stowe. Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes.

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