Precious

imdb.com 

The film opens with a symbolic gesture of a red scarf tied to a lamppost. We see a girl being approached by what looks like a fairy godmother wearing scarlet. She delicately places a red scarf around Precious's neck, and this scene disappears. Precious likes illusions like this one. She dreams of being a movie star on the cover of a magazine, at the top of her class, and marrying her handsome math teacher. In reality, however she's an obese, pregnant, illiterate 16 year old. She is verbally abused by her mother and is sexually abused by her father whom she becomes pregnant for twice. Whenever Precious is pushed down literally and figuratively she has flashbacks of being a movie star. We see this while her father is raping her and Precious has a dream fantasy of being a gliztly famous woman dancing on stage. In this way Precious is a little girl who disappears into her imagination to hide from reality.

When Precious enters the classroom at the alternative school there's a huge ray of light symbolizing heaven and angels, which is exactly what Ms. Rain becomes to Precious. School gets better letter by letter, day by day. When Precious gives birth to her second child Abdul, things start to climax graphically. Precious find her life shattered as is displayed on the movie cover, but growth usually follows a storm. That's the main theme of the movie and the two lessons learned, growth and love. Red is the color of love, the color of the scarf Precious ties around the little neighborhood girl's neck. It's the color of the scarf that is tied around her neck at the beginning of the movie. Love is what Precious is looking for, and what she wants to be tied around her neck. She finds it in subtle and unexpected places, in her teacher Miss Rain, in Nurse John, and in her fellow classmates, in her children and in herself. These two things are things that Precious dedicates the rest of her life to finding.

Screen :) 

8/10