“Why is everything so urgent with you?” Nina (Nia Long) asks Darius (Larenz Tate) at a pivotal moment in Love Jones, Theodore Witcher’s detail-rich depiction of an on-again, off-again relationship. “I love you,” Darius responds. “That’s urgent like a motherfucker.” The question of immediacy is integral to Witcher’s debut feature, which revolves around a small circle of twentysomething Black Chicagoans trying to untangle, among other things, the differences between sex and love.
Darius, a poet, instantly clicks with Nina, a photographer, on a physical and artistic level. Both are beguiled by each other’s intellect, and in a key scene, he quotes Mozart only for her to tell him that he’s mistaken, and that the quote is by George Bernard Shaw. Witcher’s screenplay overflows with a lived-in specificity and nuance, much of it tied to how language and desire interact. “It was like his dick just…talked to me,” Nina says to her friend Josie (Lisa Nicole Carson), who, staring back with her mouth agape, responds, “What it say?”
Witcher has an ear for wry humor that recalls Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco, which was released a year after Love Jones. Both films center around characters navigating the pitfalls of urban life, sex, and love in the context of nightlife, their conversations weaving in and out of topics as quickly as their eyes dart across a room toward a prospective lover.
But in contrast to Last Days of Disco, several of Love Jones’s characters are creatives who both play and work within nightlife spaces. In an early scene set inside the Sanctuary, an intimate nightclub specializing in spoken-word performances, Darius recites a lengthy, hilariously explicit poem dedicated to Nina, whom he’s recently met. Outside the club, after Darius asks her which topics she prefers aside from sex, Nina takes a pen and writes “love” on his wrist. In this moment, Witcher finds a visual means to both understate the film’s theme and further reveal Nina’s wit—a double-edged purpose that’s emblematic of the subtle ways in which Love Jones navigates the familiar terrain of the romantic comedy.
If Stillman has a certain detached, ironic affection for his characters, Witcher’s is more sincere, especially throughout the second half of Love Jones. Smartly, Witcher revises the trope in rom-coms of lovers realizing that they’re meant to be together after enduring a last-minute, often arbitrarily conceived, challenge. In this film, that process is much more gradual and realistic, given Witcher’s attunement to the push-pull between Nina and Darius as lovers and professionals, namely the ways in which they go about sabotaging their relationship.
While the film’s focus on and understanding of Nina and Darius is substantial, it also takes time to introduce and follow through on storylines involving other characters, who in a lesser rom-com would be relegated to sounding boards for the central couple. Darius’s friend Savon (Isaiah Washington) is going through a messy break-up, and Witcher devotes time to this man’s troubles so that his subsequent conversations with Darius are understood to come from an enriched place. Elsewhere, Hollywood (Bill Bellamy) offers his perspective on why he’s “Mr. Romance” during an early scene so that when he shows up to a party with Nina later, drawing Darius’s ire, there’s a sense of who this man is beyond a plot device. Witcher takes each of these characters and their predicaments seriously across a series of dense and engaging philosophical exchanges that would require multiple viewings to fully digest.
Image/Sound
The 4K digital restoration on this Blu-ray is so stellar that it makes one wish that Criterion had gone the extra mile and given Love Jones a UHD release as well. Nevertheless, a 4K scan on a Blu-ray proves much more than adequate, especially when compared to the 2006 DVD from Warner Bros. Blacks and blues are especially vibrant here, with nighttime scenes under the Chicago moonlight revealing the level of care taken to bring out the detail of the film’s 35mm negative. Image depth and detail is also consistently stunning throughout. The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track is delicate and forceful in equal measure. An early scene in a record shop is the standout, balancing a jazz track by Charlie Parker and dialogue between Larenz Tate and Nia Long so that the music track isn’t overly amplified on the soundtrack.
Extras
In a new commentary track, Theodore Witcher offers a window into his creative choices and inspirations, the latter of which include Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Terence Young’s Dr. No. A 2021 conversation between film scholar Racquel J. Gates and Witcher examines Love Jones’s “iconic” status, offering a recent BET Awards reception for Long and Tate as exhibit number one. The nearly 45-minute conversation is especially engaging because of Gates’s profound knowledge of and enthusiasm for the film, and Witcher is precise when explaining how and why Love Jones fits into the landscape of Black ’90s cinema.
A panel discussion from 2017, featuring members of the cast and crew and moderated by filmmaker Barry Jenkins, is a lively affair, though it’s somewhat redundant of the Gates interview. A half-hour conversation, recorded in 2021, between music professors Mark Anthony Neal and Shana L. Redmond examines the film’s music and soundtrack, which Redmond calls significant for how it expanded the complexity of Black music on film, namely through the use of contemporary R&B, jazz, and spoken word. Rounding out the extras is a behind-the-scenes featurette from 1997 on the film’s production and an essay by writer Danielle Amir Jackson that focuses on how Chicago is a character unto itself in Love Jones.
Overall
An eloquent and underseen ensemble dramedy, Love Jones receives a sparkling 4K transfer and a hearty helping of extras from the Criterion Collection.
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