A former beauty queen and single mom prepares her rebellious teenage daughter for the “Miss Juneteenth” pageant.
Juneteenth is often simply remembered as the day in which slavery officially ended in the United States but for Black America, it has grown into a symbolic cultural tradition that celebrates the values of education, self-improvement, resilience, and family. Juneteenth is a unique holiday in that it connects the people of Black America together after they were robbed of their own cultural origins. Thus, a pageant called Miss Juneteenth was also born to further celebrate black female voices and support their ambitions.
“Miss Juneteenth” as a celebration may be unfamiliar to some, but the film is a fitting introduction to the pageant and how it became a symbol of hope for many young black women. However, “Miss Juneteenth” as a film goes beyond the expository of cultural significance and introduces a space where ordinary stories are grown to exemplify the most extraordinary of black women.
Nicole Beharie plays Turquoise Jones, a single mother struggling to make ends meet for her daughter due to an unreliable baby daddy and a lack of a degree to bolster financial capabilities. Jones or “Turq” is resistant to the harsh realities of being a single mother as she holds onto her past title of Miss Juneteenth with bittersweet pride and hopes that her daughter will be able to accomplish the same. Yet, hope is a small but mighty thing. Turq forgoes her responsibilities as a mother, blinded by a passion for a pageant that she also grieves for because she was not able to fully realize the potential expected of someone with the title of Miss Juneteenth.
Beharie plays Turq with a strong aura of bittersweet nostalgia. Her character may be long past her prime, but Beharie shines with the youth that lives on in Turq’s heart. Turquoise Jones reaches for the Miss Juneteenth pageant like Great Gatsby reaches for his green light, but it is Beharie’s outstretched performance that keeps a tight grasp on your affection for her character. Furthermore, Beharie’s chemistry with Alexis Chikaeze, playing her daughter Kai, is a delight to see on screen. Without such chemistry, it would have been impossible to build an onscreen relationship that accurately depicts the temperamental love of single parenthood.
Although Turq spends much of the duration of the film living in the past, it is only through her daughter Kai is she brought back into the present. Specifically, the climactic performance of her daughter’s interpretative monologue and dance of “Phenomenal Women” by Maya Angelou allows Turq to let go and move forward to a new beginning. It is no longer loss that she feels when thinking about the past, but it is a healing acceptance and newfound pride for her daughter’s own phenomenality of being a black woman.
“Miss Juneteenth” does not lose sight of Turq’s individualism at the expense of a pageant collective nor does it lose sight of the journey it takes for one black woman to pass on her phenomenal strength to another black woman, especially in navigating motherhood. The film does well in reminding its audience that black stories do not always have to be about spreading anti-racism or activism, but good black stories can be told simply to share the resilience in their narratives as a tribute to their black bodies.
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