A Thousand and One, review
A Thousand and One
UK release: 21 April 2023
Director: A.V. Rockwell
Starring: Teyana Taylor, Aaron Kingsley Adetola, Aven Courtney
Review by Sarah Edwards
A Thousand and One traces the journey of single mother Inez (Teyanna Taylor) after she kidnaps her son, Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), from foster care, and struggles to give him the life he deserves. The film’s events unwind over more than a decade, following Inez from her release from prison in 1994 to Terry’s senior year of high school. Inez hustles to find work, secure an apartment, and keep Terry in school, while Terry navigates the trials of Black boyhood in a city increasingly hostile to him.
Motherhood does not come easily to Inez. She stumbles often when trying to connect to her son, buying him toys he doesn’t like or shoes a size too big for his feet. Terry’s early life remains a sizable gap between them. Inez offers no answers for her absences, and avoids the subject well into his adolescence.
When a six-year-old Terry mentions that she abandoned him on the street corner, Inez turns hostile and demands he get that idea out of his head, but refuses to provide the full story. Without a satisfactory explanation, the murkiness of their past is not so easily forgotten. On the night she takes Terry, she screams at him that she would go to war for him against the entire city.
In essence, by kidnapping him, this is what she has done. She sacrifices her passion for hairstyling to provide for him and agonises constantly about losing him to the police or social services. Her love for her son is an undeniable fact. This love, however, is not one without its challenges, nor is it ever expressed simply.
As Terry grows into adolescence, her attachment to him turns into an overwhelming fear of losing him, and her desire to see him achieve the best for himself pushes her to ignore his own wishes. Whether or not she is a good mother is left to the viewer to decide. Terry, for his part, grows to resent his mother in the way many teenagers begin to at the parent in the difficult position of raising them. Throughout the film we see him at crossroads - learning to talk to girls, choosing between high schools, picking a college (if any) to attend. An awkward, gentle boy, he struggles with his mother’s expectations and those of the city around him.
As thirteen-year-old Terry, Aven Courtney brings a sensitivity and earnestness to his performance that add depth to the character and makes him sympathetic in a way that Inez, with her constantly defensive and hotheaded demeanour, is not. Josiah Cross shines equally in his 17-year-old counterpart, carrying the weight of the film’s heaviest emotional beats as well as some of its more comedic moments. The film’s third major character, Lucky, enters the narrative nearly a quarter of the way through. Fresh out of prison, Lucky’s presence feels tentative, shaky. It never feels certain whether he’s there to stay, or two minutes from leaving for good.
A Thousand and One embraces this ambiguity, allowing its characters to be many things at once. Though not defined by their pasts, Inez, Lucky, and Terry all struggle to be there for each other. This does not mean they don’t try. Just as Inez can love her son, but be too harsh on him, so can Lucky love Terry, even if he fails to be the stable father figure Terry desperately wants him to be. Moments of vulnerability between the two men are some of the most touching in the film.
A consequence of the large span of time covered by the film in only two hours is that much of its early scenes are rushed through. In the first thirty minutes, we speed through Inez’s release from prison, her reunion with Terry, and their brief stints in two apartments before they finally settle in Harlem. The film imbues many of its smallest details with meaning, but in these brief snapshots the full meaning may not fully come through until a second viewing, when their significance has already been made clear by the events near the end of the film’s run time. Some elements, however, never receive the time they deserve. Inez’s relationship with Lucky in particular feels underdeveloped. While by the end of the film it is clear that they do love each other, it’s difficult to pinpoint what drew them together in the first place.
Even with this drawback, stretching the narrative over such a long period of time does serve a purpose. It allows A Thousand and One to fully leverage its setting, and tell a story that feels uniquely grounded in this period of New York’s history without being overwhelmed by it. This film does not go out of its way to be about ‘tough on crime policies,’ the epidemic of crack and heroin use, the 2008 financial crisis, or the gentrification of historically Black neighbourhoods. Yet it uses these elements to highlight the nearly insurmountable odds Terry faces in creating a life for himself, and does so in a way that remains relevant a decade and a half after the film takes place.
New York’s specialised high schools, like the one Terry considers attending, continue to face controversy over their strikingly low admittance rates for Black and Latino applicants. While on his way home from the laundromat, Terry is stopped and frisked by police officers with seemingly no justification beyond his skin colour. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg only apologised for the city’s use of these tactics in late 2019. Details in the narratives such as these drive home that the instability these characters face is not a natural fact of life, but in many cases were the result of active policy choices.
Where A Thousand and One stumbles it does not fall far. The saturated colour palette can sometimes turn shadows into a muddled darkness that obscures faces and other details. Some moments of dialogue aim for high drama and land instead in cliche. Ultimately, however, these are footnotes in a film that is complex, emotionally gripping, and heartfelt. At its core, it is a film about a family doing their best to love each other, however imperfectly, and it more than delivers on this front. A strong feature debut from writer and director AV Rockwell, who, if this film is any indication, has a bright future ahead.