By Rych McCain
The subject of the hurt and pain that love can produce is grist for the mill in many romance books, TV shows and movies. Ghanaian film maker Leila Djansi who brought us “Ties That Bind,” starring Kimberly Elise has a new movie “And Then There Was You” coming out this week on RLJ and One Village DVD starring Haitian born beauty Garcelle Beauvais.
The statuesque beauty is no stranger to TV and movies. Fans know her work as Fancy Monroe on WB Network’s “The Jamie Foxx Show;” Assistant DA Valerie Heywood on ABC-TV’s “NYPD,” the movie “White House Down” and many others to numerous to name. Beauvais plays Natalie Gilbert, who becomes jilted by her husband who secretly has another family that she eventually finds out about. She then jumps into another situation which is just as bad. Will her luck on love ever turn for the better? The story has some interesting twists and turns. You’ll need to see it to discover how it all turns out.
Beauvais’ character Natalie went through a lot of heavy emotions in this film. How did Beauvais envision an interpretation to do this role? She smiles, “She did go through a lot and it was a lot of work. When I read the script, what I loved about it was that I thought everybody could relate to it. The fact that this woman is putting her life back together and opening her heart. But what I really loved at the end is that not only did she forgive but she took responsibility of her part in the relationship. Which I think so many times you want to blame but we don’t see that we had a part in it. So that’s what I loved about it.”
Beauvais does a lot of crying in this film and the tears were real. How much of a physical toll did that take? She breaks out laughing, “It was exhausting at the end of the day but as an actor, that’s what you have to do. You have to use something that you have, something that you can think of. You just have to conjure that emotion and bring it to life.”
This role allowed Beauvais the opportunity to work with several children and she bonded with them well. A gleam sparks in her eyes and she says, “I have three kids of my own, so I love kids. So that was great. I had no problem with that. That was easy.”
This film was an indie, so what was the shooting process like? Beauvais laments, “We shot for 17 days. The hours were grueling but we got it. It was a labor of love.”
In adding to what Beauvais said, the film’s director, writer and co-producer Leila Djansi explains how she came up with the concept for this movie. Djansi says of the script, “It was not personal. My mom is a doctor so growing up in West Africa (Ghana); I’ve always been like a third eye when she’s with her patients because sometimes I would help her out. And a lot of the patients are women and interestingly, most of the problems that they come with are child or marriage driven. And so I’ve always wanted to tell different kinds of stories about women. So I told this story about a woman who could not have a child and what that means to a woman. Because for a woman, most of the time your validation is in being married and having a child. Hopefully, in 2014 it’s no longer like that but that is what it used to be. So what does it mean for a woman who can not validate herself?”
She also says the desires and wants of women in the U.S. are basically similar to the women in Africa because a woman is a woman first regardless of what part of the world she lives.
Rych McCain can be found at:
www.rychmccainhollyhoodnotes.blogspot.com
www.rychmccainreviewwagon.blogspot.com