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Last year's Mo' Better Blues, a dyspeptic study of a musician who cares only for his trumpet and his ego, took heat for its sardonic depiction of two Jewish businessmen. Lee had an answer for that charge too. He wanted to open Jungle Fever with advice to those who accused him of anti-Semitism: "They can kiss my black ass." After discussions with his patrons at Universal, the prologue was cut, but the director is typically unrepentant. "They can kiss my black ass two times," he avers...
What remains of Jungle Fever is controversial enough. Some people have urged a boycott because, they allege, the film puts down black women. Lee is hardly unique among black directors (or, notoriously, black rap artists) in viewing woman as something between an enemy and an enigma. In Boyz N the Hood, most of the women are shown as doped-up, career-obsessed or irrelevant to the man's work of raising a son in an American war zone...
However valid the charge against the women in Lee's earlier films, it is misplaced in Jungle Fever. In a "war council," black women discuss the lure of white men and the hierarchy of skin tone. "I'm going for a true tribesman," one woman says. Another (played by Lonette McKee), deemed more attractive to whites and blacks because she has light skin and Caucasian features, decries her isolation from both worlds...
Like Do the Right Thing, which began as a live-action Sesame Street and then flipped out into a race riot, Jungle Fever is really two movies in one: the first hour an essay on various volatile issues, the second a dramatization of how these issues inform and ruin ordinary lives. Lee tries hard to spread the intensity, and the ignorance, judiciously. He lets a geek chorus of Italian- American guys in Bensonhurst blame black men for everything from Central Park rapes to the mongrelization of jockdom. "They took our sports," one fellow grouses, "baseball, football, basketball, boxing. What...
...genital superiority. The film's title announces as much. This is a story, Lee says, "about two people who came together because of sexual mythology." The legend on a jacket worn by one of Lee's colleagues at last month's Cannes Film Festival put the matter bluntly: JUNGLE FEVER, OR FEAR OF THE BIG BLACK DICK...