For Coloured Girls: Is it too good for audience?

Whoopi Goldberg.
Producer and director: Tyler Perry
Cinema: Eastgate
Running time: 130 minutes
Type of film: real life drama
Are restriction: Adults only
This magnificent, once in a lifetime film is based on an award winning play by Ntozake Shange.
After 75 years of viewing Hollywood’s product, I admit I’ve grown hard and skeptical, always in doubt that I’d ever see a film which, in fulfilling my expectations, paid homage to the challenge: “Full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes”.
So good and so important is this film that it begs the question: “Is it too good for the audience (anywhere in the world) which will see it?” Perfectly properly rated for Adults Only, I fear it will fall foul of the situation in Harare where relatively few adults go to the movies.
A word about the terminology denoting those Americans of African descent. When I was born in 1928 and raised in New York, the term Negro was too frequently debased to the pejorative N word.
In time, the word coloured shared the marketplace with Negro, ultimately replacing it. Then came the switch to black, and now African American is the universal term, having been almost instantly adopted when Americans of African origin wanted to be listed under the same sort of terminology as Italian-Americans or Polish Americans.
African Americans currently make up about 11 percent of the US population: 21 million out of approximately 304 million. Interestingly, most Zimbabweans, when asked, think the percentage is much higher.
It will be noted that the cast names for the film include no males although, indeed, males are vital for the film’s plot to have any meaning.
The eight named actresses in the billing are the eight whose experiences invariably encompassing, for better or worse loving and/or fighting the men in their lives. It must be said that neither sex gets a clean bill of health in this film: but it is admittedly told by and seen through the female point of view.
Not a moment too long at more than two hours, we are privy never before tried in a film to four different 5 minute uninterrupted monologues, from which we readily infer the speaker’s reaction to the bitterness of her life’s experiences. Put bluntly, their men receive no kudos from them.
One incident calls out for special attention. Frank and Ella, unmarried, with two small children, live (un) happily together. In a crazed moment of despair he dangles and then drops the two children from a fifth story window. Even I hardened as I thought I was burst into tears.