the filmlinc blog

NYFF09: Festival Centerpiece Lee Daniels’ PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL “PUSH” BY SAPPHIRE

With Saturday's festival centerpiece Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire director Lee Daniels' introduces character Clareece “Precious” Jone (Gabourey Sidibe) to New York City audiences.

Pregnant with her second child, "Precious" is expelled from high school at the age of sixteen, returning home to serve her non-working, welfare check-reliant, verbally and physically abusive, powder-keg of a mother (played by remarkable Mo'Nique). Trench warfare would be a safer alternative. And yet despite facing a childhood one-upping the merely "traumatic," Precious has remained uncrushed. In moments of crisis, she fantasizes that her numbers have come in. She is on BET, doing red carpets, dating the right kind of light-skinned Latino boyfriend she "prefers": she is anywhere but in the life where her mother screams that she hates her, that nobody loves her, that she is stupid, and that nobody ever will care whether she lives or dies.

"I'm going to break thru," Precious tells herself. "Or someone is going to break through to me." And as it happens, help does arrive. Her former principal refers her to an alternative high school Each One Teach One, her first real chance at human contact, affection. Not only a new start, perhaps the first start for her education in a system that has failed her.