Daughters of the Dust (1991) Review

I'll be perfectly honest with you. Daughters of the Dust has definitely been my least favorite film I've reviewed so far. I really did not enjoy it at all, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the narrative style was confusing. Unlike traditional narratives, there was no real chronology. Now, I'm not one of those people that gets confused by flashbacks or flash-forwards, but the thing is I can usually tell when those events are occurring. There was no real sense of time in this film. I don't know if the events took place over the course of a day, a week, or even just a few hours.

Partly as a result of this, I had a hard time figuring out exactly what the story was. Don't get me wrong, I figured out the basics: family of islanders is going to move to the mainland, creating conflicts between the different generations. I could also figure out the various conflicts: Violet's Christianity at odds with the rest of the family's tribal beliefs, Haagar being pissed at everyone who doesn't want to leave, Eli broken up over his wife's rape, Yellow Mary at odds with the rest of the family over her past, etc. The thing is, I couldn't figure out the source of a lot of these conflicts. Why do the rest of the women consider Yellow Mary "ruint"? Why is Haagar so pissed off all the time? Why won't Eula tell Eli who raped her?

I think that the main reason for this is the fact that nearly all of the dialogue is spoken in the particular and peculiar dialect of the islanders. While I was able to figure out the gist of it (I think), a lot of the subtle details blew right passed me because I really could not understand what the people were saying. If there had been subtitles, I think this wouldn't have been a problem.

However, since I couldn't understand them, since I couldn't figure out what the root of a lot of the conflicts were, since I couldn't really get a grasp of the entire storyline, I found the film to be quite boring. It was the longest 112 minutes I've ever sat throught. Even Return of the King felt shorter than this film.

While I can't really call Daughters of the Dust an out-and-out bad movie, I can say that I found it highly confusing and that I really don't reccomend it unless you're really interested in alternate storytelling methods. Otherwise, you should probably avoid it.