Christina Cooper

(On TV, April 2021) With a title like South Central Love, you already know what to expect — love in one of Los Angeles’ least privileged neighbourhoods, with its attendant racial and poverty issues. It does take a long time for the romance to rev up between our likable hero and just-as-likable heroine as they try to set themselves apart from so many other people in a neighbourhood seemingly eager to keep them back. As someone who’s a continent away from South Central Los Angeles (although I did walk through it once), I found the film interesting for its de4piction of a completely different way of life — the irony being that as a low-budget effort, South Central Love is not creating a new world as much as showing how things are. Writer/director Christina Cooper also stars in the film, and manages to create a convincing sense of place from what she has at her disposal. Ironically enough, South Central Love is at its best when stepping away from the clichés of South Central in order to develop its romance. It’s not so distinctive nor remarkable when it abruptly tries to wrap this love story in a far more familiar tale of crime and loyalty in the ghetto — despite my own liking for genre stories, I almost wish the film would have dispensed with the crime elements that come to dominate the third act in order to keep on showing something that few films do: young people building a life without major movie-grade crises affecting them. Still, I liked the result well enough — South Central Love is engaging even to white suburban middle-aged men such as myself, and there’s a compelling quality to the script that kept me interested much longer than comparable romantic films. Looking at Cooper’s IMDB page, I see that she has an amazing number of projects in pre-production — I’ll be curious to see what else she’ll end up achieving.