A Thousand and One (2023)

This year’s big winner at Sundance is not so easy to classify. It’s part romance, part coming-of-age story, and part gritty tale of a Black woman surviving in the big city of New York, taking us to Harlem. But A Thousand and One also has a giant plot twist I was not expecting, in case you like those kinds of things (a friend of mine caught it from the trailer so there’s that too, I must have missed something). Teyana Taylor owns most of the screen time here as Inez, who we see released from Rikers as a 22-year-old and looking up her 6-year-old son Terry in the foster care system. He has a wound on his face and he says he wants to be with her. So she takes him. At first she homeschools him but then she finds papers and a false name to get him into public school. And it turns out he is very bright, in the gifted range, with many opportunities opening for him, although his ambitions are more to be a music producer. Along the way, the man Inez says is his father shows up (William Catlett)—"Lucky,” he goes by, though he explains ruefully at one point he has that nickname because he is not. I was all set up thinking it was going to be a movie about difficulties of single-adulting but Terry is not that old before Inez and Lucky make it more or less a regulation nuclear family. We see three versions of Terry as the movie skips ahead from 1994 to maybe 2005 or so, when Terry reaches the age of 18: Aaron Kingsley Adetola as a 6-year-old, Aven Courtney as a 13-year-old, and Josiah Cross as a 17-year-old. For the most part, through a good many predictable but relatable ups and downs, they seem to be a pretty good family unit. Then, in the last third of the picture, they become victims of a new landlord intent on redeveloping the property. Things generally go to hell at this point, the incoming plot twist shakes things up even more severely, and you will likely want to have a hanky on hand because the immovable resilience of this family essentially encounters the irresistible force of modern life. It becomes an urban survival story after all. Do things work out? We don’t really know because the movie leaves us hanging on the next chapter, which also turns out to be a very good point to end it—ambivalent, suggestive, with room for hope and reason for despair. Something to talk about over pie and coffee. I’m not sure I believed everything going on in A Thousand and One but I’m glad I saw it, for Taylor’s powerful performance and a healthy jolt of feels.