‘Beyond Black Beauty’ Prime Video Series Review - From Belgium With Dreams

How/What do you write about a show that makes you feel absolutely nothing - something so terrible, so nasty, so prosaic that your mind, like an alarm, goes off every five minutes to tell you to stop looking at the screen? Created by Carmen Pilar Golden, Beyond Black Beauty is inspired by Anna Sewell's novel Black Beauty, but if THIS is the kind of result "inspiration" yields, then maybe we should all stop getting influenced by classic stories. It doesn't matter how many masterpieces you feed to a mediocre, unimaginative mind. The result, perhaps, will always be disappointing. Beyond Black Beauty struggles to do basic things right. It's so amateurish that you don't like comparing it to a student film. Danger signs start appearing in front of your eyes from the beginning. Jolie (Kaya Coleman), an equestrian, wants to go to the Olympics. Her dreams, however, take a back seat when her mother, Janelle (Sagine Sémajuste), takes her to Baltimore (they live - or lived - in Belgium). Why? Blame Cedric (Gilles Marini), Jolie's dad and Janelle's husband. He is held responsible for duping several clients. While he fixes his professional life, Jolie and Janelle start afresh in the latter's urban ranch.

Jolie doesn't like her new surroundings. She irks one of her cousins, Ronnie (Gina James), with her unkind description of the ranch. You definitely know what this means: Beyond Black Beauty will be about Jolie accepting Baltimore as her new home and how she and Ronnie will develop a strong, friendly relationship. Yes and yes, except all this occurs in the first episode itself. The change isn't highlighted dramatically. It just...happens. Such casualness is tightly woven into the fabric of Beyond Black Beauty. Alvin (Akiel Julien) and Jolie's attraction towards each other is marked not by firecrackers but by the hissing sound of a tire getting punctured. Serena (Maia Jae Bastidas) looks like a wannabe bully. She doesn't look as physically or mentally powerful as Ronnie, and she is introduced into, and later removed from, the story carelessly. Janelle's feelings for a college mate are ignited without palpable passion - whatever exists or existed between them feels so cold that you find it hard to believe that this space was once inhabited by warm intimacy. Jolie admires Gretchen (Tine Roggeman), an equestrian who has been to the Olympics. Gretchen, though, exudes hostile intentions: She seems hell-bent on sabotaging Jolie's career. Gretchen challenges Jolie to make it to Belgium without her help for a big competition. Jolie confidently accepts the challenge and succeeds, thus rendering insignificant Gretchen's villainy. In Belgium, Beauty, the horse, is held up at customs, jeopardizing Jolie's chance to participate in the competition. What a promising, tense moment! Beyond Black Beauty, however, solves this issue with a flick of its finger.

If nothing else, at least the scene where Jolie bonds with Beauty should have been magical, inspiring, and heart-warming. Beyond Black Beauty tries to present this moment "poetically" by displaying Jolie and Beauty as silhouettes, but the effect is more laughable than artistic because the whole story is told very literally, dully. Nothing here looks significant - no sense of romance, mystery, thrill, or urgency exists. Sometimes, there seems to be no connection between the scenes. Jolie's doubts regarding herself before her performance in Belgium emerge from nowhere (things that occur before this event don't suggest the eruption of such feelings). There is one moment that shines with dramatic possibilities, and it comes when Alvin - while confronting Jolie - tells Ronnie to leave. Alvin and Ronnie have been best friends for a long time. Yet, he doesn't tell her about his personal situation, and now, instead of saying anything to her, he chooses to talk to Jolie. This must have hurt Ronnie, but the show casts an inconsequential gaze on this point. Beyond Black Beauty sees storytelling as something that's merely packed with generate-conflicts-solve-conflicts beats. After every five minutes, a new complication arises, and within the next five minutes, it's resolved and replaced by something else. Lather, rinse, repeat. Beyond Black Beauty also suffers from monotony. Everything is dipped into the same bland tone, which means a divorce and a rodeo win give you the same feeling: The feeling that what you are watching is nugatory.

Beyond Black Beauty initially gives you the impression that it wants to portray all white characters as evil. Cedric is referred to as a criminal; Gretchen and her family, as well as Cedric's father and mother, look like cartoonish villains. Gretchen's crew members literally whitewash Black history in one of the episodes, and Janelle's parents talk about the importance of teaching their history to the children. Like everything else in Beyond Black Beauty, this Black vs White narrative comes across as trivial because it's undeveloped - the bad guys are cartoon caricatures. Ultimately, only two scenes directly speak to us. One has Yvonne (Lisa Berry) yelling at Janelle to make up her mind - a sentiment that can also be extended to Beyond Black Beauty. You want the show to pick a tone, a lane for its story. In the second one, Alvin and Jolie press their face against a haystack and then scream loudly. This is what you feel like doing while sitting through Beyond Black Beauty.

Final Score- [1/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times
Note: All 11 episodes are screened for this review.
Premiere Date: Oct 15, 2024, on Prime Video