It’s a woman’s world for Rainbow Gold (Victoria Gabrielle Platt) in this dusted-off 90s gem from a pioneering Black film-maker, getting its first, very belated, release in UK and Irish cinemas. Rainbow’s mother, Alma (Kim Weston-Moran), is the respectable proprietor of a beauty parlour, operated out of their Brooklyn brownstone and between appointments as she instructs her teenage daughter in the principles of financial independence and keeping one’s legs shut. Rainbow, however, has other ideas, encouraged by her fabulous, French-speaking Aunt Ruby (Mizan Kirby) and her own raging hormones.
Ayoka Chenzira wrote and directed this film only a few years after Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust became the first feature film directed by an African American woman to get a US theatrical release. But 1994 was apparently still too soon for this appealing mother-daughter story to reach the same audiences who had warmly embraced Steel Magnolias (1989) and Mermaids (1990).
