Losing Ground is a 1982 American independent comedy-drama film written and directed by Kathleen Collins.
Sara Rogers (Seret Scott) and her husband Victor (Bill Gunn) are an upper-middle-class African-American couple in New York City, with typical indie-drama jobs: she's a professor of philosophy busy with a thesis on "ecstasy", and he's a painter. At the beginning of the film Victor hits it big as one of his works is sold to a museum for a sizeable fee. Flush with success, he rents out a house in upstate New York to use as a studio for the summer. Sara goes along, if rather grudgingly (as moving upstate takes her away from her research materials).
In the small town where they are spending the summer, Victor meets a curvaceous Puerto Rican named Celia (Maritza Rivera), whom he starts painting and then has an affair with. Sara is apparently used to this, but still gets offended when Victor starts bringing Celia home. Meanwhile, one of Sara's students, a film major, recruits her to act in his movie. When Sara finds herself attracted to her costar, Duke (Duane Jones, Night of the Living Dead), a hypocritical Victor gets very jealous.
Tropes:
- Even the Girls Want Her: Subtly implied. A male student in Sara's class who is obviously enchanted with her asks if she has a husband and then says that he's a lucky man. Later, a woman in Sara's class (one of the only white people in the movie) gets advice on her paper. The woman then also says that Sara's husband must be a lucky man, leaving Sara to wonder why everyone is so interested in her husband.
- Fortune Teller: One scene has Sara, who evidently is looking for some manifestation of the mystic as part of her thesis, talk with a Romani fortune teller. When the Phony Psychic gives a rather pathetic psychic reading ("I see you with a tall dark man with a top hat, and they're taking your picture"), Sara walks off.
- Love Dodecahedron: Victor starts messing around with his model, followed by Sara becoming attracted to her tall, handsome co-star. Things get awkward when Sara brings Duke home for the weekend and all four start hanging out.
- Meet Cute: Victor first sees Celia in the park, dancing the samba to a drum beat, because why not? They dance together for a while, and soon Victor is painting her.
- No Ending: Although the Show Within a Show does get an ending. The ugly blowup at the end of the foursome party weekend cuts directly to Sara, back in NYC, filming the end of her movie. Victor drives up, runs to the top of the parking garage, and finds the crew filming the end of the movie where Sara's character shoots her faithless lover. Duke acts out collapsing and dying while Victor watches in astonishment. Roll credits, without answering if Victor and Sara will stay together or not.
- P.O.V. Cam: The camera bobs around from Victor's perspective as he walks through a Puerto Rican neighborhood looking for stuff to paint.
- Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic: Filled with a lot of writerly dialogue that doesn't sound like things people would say in conversation."Apparently, this is my first incarnation as a Negro. I must have built up a lot of karmic debt.""It's uncalled for you to fling one of your private little ecstasies in my face."
- Rom Com Job: Sara's a philosophy teacher, Victor's an artist, and just as a bonus, Sara's mom Leila is an actress on the stage.
- Shout-Out:
- Sara's overenthusiastic student, George, compares her to Lucia Moses from The Scar of Shame, as well as Dorothy Dandridge.
- Sara and her mother Leila share a memory of Sara, when she was a little girl, overhearing her mother having sex with "Welles".
- Show Within a Show: Sara stars in a movie that is based on the "Frankie and Johnny
" story but seems to chiefly involve a lot of walking around on the roof of a parking garage.Duke: This what they call one of those avant-garde movies? - Starbucks Skin Scale: Sara, who is lighter-skinned than either Victor or Duke, plays the lead in a Show Within a Show about the "tragic mulatto".
- Table Space: Sara is not happy at all about Victor bringing his sexy model to the house. This is demonstrated in a scene where Victor and Sara are eating dinner at the opposite ends of a long table, with the camera swiveling back and forth as she fires questions at him.
- Trrrilling Rrrs: Apparently a Puerto Rican seduction technique, as one of the women in the neighborhood trills an R at Victor, while all of them are catcalling him.
