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| Scene from The 40-Year-Old Version |
For everyone, growing old has its share of nightmares. It's the fear of losing your vitality, an inability to connect with a world that thrives on youth. For most people, it's a struggle that has its own workarounds, but not if you're on the verge of becoming a 40-year-old Black woman. In Radha Blank's directorial debut, she does an impressive job of exploring self-expression at an age when nobody wants to listen, instead of asking you to compromise your vision to the tried and true. What Blank argues in The 40-Year-Old Version is not what the value of success is, but whether or not it is important to be true to yourself. With a debut, she bears her soul with an urgency that recalls a perspective not often allowed in the cinema. As a result, it feels at times breathtaking as well as frustrating, realizing how many other voices out there are being ignored, crushed by expectations of a society that doesn't like you unless you fit certain conventions.
