Phat Girlz

I watched that movie last night, or a good part of it. It was sort of formulaic, and sort of creaked, but sort of not.

The plot, for those who don't know, is that Mo'nique plays a, well, fat girl. She is not happy about being fat, she has a skinny cousin and a medium-sized friend, she works in a department store and is an aspiring fashion designer. For larger women, needless to say.

Through a plot machination that I was out of the room for, she and her friends end up at a resort, where the two larger girls meet and entice visiting Nigerians. Being Nigerians, they are enchanted by the larger women. The friend, whose name escapes me, has a lot of sex with her Nigerian, and loses her librarian look. Mo'nique's Nigerian is a more fleshed-out character, and he falls hard for her, but she is unable to accept the fact that he can possibly love her just as she is. Gee, that sounds almost exactly like someone I know.

She manages to drive him off. She has a crise de avoirdupois, but decides to accept herself as she is. (They start forthwith to dress her more flatteringly after that point, interestingly). A very large Deus ex Machina gets her designs seen by someone who can help her, and she founds her clothing line, called "Thick Madame". There is a truly amazing scene of her mythical fashion show, with exclusively plus-sized models and attended almost exclusively by plus-sized women, of every hue. It ends with her going to Nigeria--well, she's got all that money now--with her friends, and looking up the impossibly good-looking Nigerian, who has been waiting for her all this time. The final scene is everyone sitting down for a meal, with the blessing including thanking God for the return of the American children, and the skinny cousin eating everything she can get her hands on so she can have a rich Nigerian, too.

Okay. This is a movie that was released and fell into obscurity, probably for two reasons. For one thing, it falls squarely into the category of a black movie, with most of the characters being black. I find it interesting in and of itself that very few white people will watch a black movie, one in their own language and set, at least mostly, in their own country, even though they'll go in droves to watch a movie in Chinese, say, with subtitles. For another thing, it deals with another marginalized segment of society, fat women.

It made a lot of interesting points. It commented on the penchant of successful young black men for skinny white blondes. It hinged a lot on the dearth of fashionable clothes for plus-sized women. It addressed American ideals of beauty, vs the ideals of beauty elsewhere in the world. And it dealt with the self-image problems that face larger women, including an inability to accept love, because they've persistantly been told that they're not deserving of it.

This movie isn't going to make me go off Weight Watchers. And I looked at Monique and I kept thinking, you'd be so much more comfortable, if you just lost a little weight--not a whole lot, just some. Just a little. You'd be able to move better. You'd be able to breathe better. On your long walk with your gorgeous Nigerian, you wouldn't be as out of breath. (These are all things I know from experience). But it is a point of view that needs to be addressed. And I admired Mo'nique for being willing to play scenes where she splayed her hands on her hips and belly and said, "This is not going away! Neither is this! I'm not going to change, so you should leave now, and stop playing me!" I also admired her for being willing to play the scene with her total breakdown about herself. She wasn't playing pretty, and I can promise you that a lot of that emotion was absolutely real.

No real conclusions from all of this, just that the movie was certainly, well, food for thought.

And here is an article I found about the movie, which I am copying since I can't figure out how to get the link in here....

With Mo'Nique as her muse, 'Phat Girlz' writer hits it big

John McMurtrie, Chronicle Staff Writer

Nnegest Likké was in the shower, rushing to get ready for a meeting, when the phone rang.

"Monique's on the line," her roommate called out.

"Monique? I don't know a Monique."

Likké got out of the shower and took the call: "Hey, sis, this is Mo!" said the voice on the other end.

Likké was still at a loss: "Mo who?"

Likké may have written a screenplay with Mo'Nique, the stand-up comic and actress, in mind, but she had no idea that her muse -- whom she had never met -- had somehow gotten a hold of her script.

Her identity finally established, Mo'Nique let Likké know why she was calling: "Girl, I got the script, and I got in the bathtub with it. I said, 'Oh, I'll read a few pages, then get out of the tub.' My bathwater went cold reading it -- I read it from beginning to end."

Then Mo'Nique spoke the words Likké had been dying to hear: "I'm down. Let's do it."

What had been a dream project of Likké's thus became reality. Not only did the Bay Area native sell her script for "Phat Girlz," but she also got to direct the movie -- something she had never done before.

"It's unbelievable, I'm overwhelmed," Likké, on the phone from Los Angeles, said about seeing her movie open in theaters nationwide last week. Made for only $2.5 million, "Phat Girlz" reached the coveted top 10 list at the box office, taking in $3.1 million over the weekend.

A bawdy comedy with melodramatic moments, "Phat Girlz" is a movie with a big heart and an unmistakable message: Jazmin (played by Mo'Nique) is a combative (though often funny) plus-size woman who comes into her own -- and finds love -- when she begins to take pride in who she is. A T-shirt she wears sums up her attitude: "Aint fat I'm sexy succulent."

Jazmin's emotional journey has similarities to the one Likké experienced.

"I always kind of felt like an underdog growing up," said Likké, who describes herself as being in her mid-30s. "One, for being kind of plus size, but also because I'm half Ethiopian. And growing up half African -- now it's a little better, but then it was tough. I got teased.

"From sixth grade to 11th grade," Likké added, "I went by the name of Kelly because I hated my name. I was trying to fit in."

Likké's parents met at UC Berkeley in the 1960s through their involvement in the civil rights movement. Her father, Senay Likké, who earned a doctorate at Cal in math and chemical engineering, became a revolutionary in his native Ethiopia; he was killed in the revolution in 1977.

Likké was raised in San Francisco until she was about 9 -- part of that time in a housing project -- then moved to East Oakland with her mother, Rosalind.

"People react differently to having self-esteem issues," Likké said, discussing her youth. "Mine was, 'I'm tough.' I thought it was cool to be tough and rebellious. And thank God I had my mom. ... My strong family support is what saved me."

After graduating from Oakland's Skyline High School and Georgia's historically black college Clark Atlanta University, Likké moved to Los Angeles in 1993 to pursue her love of screenwriting. To make money, she taught English and drama to high school students for a few years. Then she and a friend began a dating-advice show on public-access TV, which led to a job as a writer and producer for the reality TV show "Blind Date."

Likké has her mother to thank for suggesting Mo'Nique as her movie's lead. It was on one of her frequent visits to see her mother -- "definitely Oakland's my home still," Likké said -- that her mother sat her down to watch "The Queens of Comedy," a stand-up show featuring Mo'Nique.

" 'Oh, you have to watch this,' " Likké laughingly recalled her mother saying. "My mom, who's really prudish -- I was shocked because 'Queens of Comedy' is not for the faint of heart."

"Phat Girlz" centers on Mo'Nique, as Jazmin, meeting a man who loves her without reservation. That man, Tunde, is from Nigeria. (He's played by the devastatingly handsome and charming Jimmy Jean-Louis, a native of Haiti who has worked as a model.) Likké wanted this character to come from Africa because as a kid, she traveled to Ethiopia and Nigeria several times to see relatives, and "over there," she recalls, "they were always like, 'Oh, look at your body, you're so strong, you're so beautiful,' because I was bigger.

"It's not just a fantasy, it's a reality," Likké said. "They even have fattening rooms over in Nigeria where people are trying to get fat. And we're over here putting our fingers down our throats to throw up!"

Likké quickly added that she doesn't mean to promote being obese: "Fattening rooms are insane, but I think they're as insane as trying to be a size 5 when your natural size is a size 14. I think they're equally extreme.

"So what does it all mean?" she asked of these differences. "The bottom line is, love yourself -- fat, skinny, short, tall, whatever. Love yourself."

E-mail John McMurtrie at jmcmurtrie@sfchronicle.com.