One of the most important aspects of a home recipe is the origin of the dish – not just what it is, but where it came from. So what happens when a beloved culinary story hides deep pain?
in black cake, Hulu’s new show based on the 2022 novel by Charmaine Wilkerson, the dessert of the title (one of the many dishes emblematic of the Caribbean’s colonial history) is played by Eleanor Bennett (played by Chipo Chan) ) and the island where she was born. Decades after fleeing her homeland, Eleanor passed away peacefully in California, leaving her children her last piece of cake. This gift comes with a series of audio recordings that challenge everything her daughter Benny (Adrian Warren) and her son Byron (Ashley Thomas) knew about her mother. Through these posthumous messages, which also tell the story of Eleanor’s growth, black cake examines how marriage, migration, and motherhood can change one’s sense of self, and how documenting those journeys can help reclaim some of what was lost. Masu.
In flashbacks, we meet a precocious young girl named Coventina “Covey” Rinkook (Mia Isaac). She is the daughter of a black Jamaican mother and a Chinese Jamaican father, and will later change her name to Eleanor. (In the books, Eleanor was born in a fictional country modeled primarily on Jamaica, but the series makes that relationship explicit.) After her mother leaves the island with her family, teenage Covey They find solace in friendship, budding romance, and the ocean. . These scenes are beautifully shot, a montage of stunning ocean panoramas, busy streets, and immersive underwater footage. These also reflect the Southern California beach cities where Eleanor raised her children, and for Benny and Byron, the visual similarities mean that despite the demographic differences, these locations are reminiscent of their Caribbean mother’s I’ll quickly prove how it alleviated my homesickness. These small connections between Eleanor’s childhood and her upbringing (sharing her love of surfing with Byron and her black cake recipe with Benny) show how much she protected Covey. Continue or amplify. hidden As an older woman.
Like many mothers, Eleanor convinces herself that she put the difficult times in her life on paper to protect her children from the truth. And the details of her departure from Jamaica are downright harrowing. Covey’s father, who has racked up heavy losses on her as a gambler, forces her to marry her local loan shark to pay off her debts. This arrangement sets in motion a chain of events that prompts Covey’s flight from her home. The series reveals the horrors of her marriage by vividly depicting the elation of her adolescence and what she is forced to put behind her. Leaving her island means giving up swimming practice with her best friend Bunny (Lashay Anderson). Bake bread with her family’s cooks. And a sweet date with her first love – all without any warning. In these early episodes, black cake It highlights the pain this rupture causes Eleanor and traces how it resonates in the lives of her children decades later. Covey’s world darkens after the warmth of Jamaica’s trees and water gives way to the gloomy concrete of England, where she first moved. These are her lonely years that she spends hiding in her anonymity to keep herself. The color saturation is reduced, the brass sound tracking disappears, and the room appears smaller.
Even in such a dull setting, Covey herself shines on screen, demonstrating her dogged determination for her own survival as much as her suffering from Jamaica to Europe to the United States. As Eleanor leaves messages to her children telling of these experiences, she begins to shed the politeness that had bound her adult life and begins to lose her former self. Begin to reconnect with your teenage girl. Although this recording is intended as a letter to Byron and Benny, it ultimately helps Eleanor regain some of the lightness of her childhood, and in a sense re-nurtures her younger self and brings her back to motherhood. will be described in a surprisingly wide range.
When the show focuses on modern-day Byron and Benny, it loses momentum as it tries to derive more drama from their storyline than the novel.because black cake ‘ is available to stream on platforms for viewers in the US, and the series is meant to feel more relatable to viewers by highlighting challenges such as racism in the workplace and dangerous encounters with police. It might become. But when considered parallel to Eleanor’s story, Byron and Benny’s by-the-numbers conflict is less interesting, and the dissonance is fading in a series that spends a significant portion of its long running time on these characters.
The focus on children’s modern concerns distracts from the show’s more pressing questions about how radically different environments shape the interconnected people who grow up within them. It also becomes. Microaggressions in America are well-known territory, but black cake The film truly shines as it explores the complex relationships that its Caribbean characters have with the island and how they pass it on to the next generation. Whether it’s a scene in which Benny bakes a cake for her mother or a flashback to Covey’s swim meet, the tastes and aromas of Eleanor’s home, both real and imagined, are evoked with nostalgic intensity. Even minus some questionable accents, it still feels remarkable to watch a thoughtfully constructed drama that ponders the identity of motherhood through the lives of Asian and Afro-Caribbean women. black cake It’s not perfect, but it’s beautifully put together.
