Netflix announced another movie during this lockdown with a very eye-catching poster showing a woman in black and white glamming up with an earring mentioned as 40 in golden, giving a perfect and suitable match to the title. It got premiered in America at Sundance Film Festival, away earlier on January 25, 2020, and later after seeing the reaction from fans, it lands on Netflix on October 9, 2020.
“The Forty-Year-Old Version” is engraved by the personal story of writer, director, and actor, all talent collected in a person, Radha Blank. Radha made it evident that approaching the age of 40 was not an easy task; every day, she worked hard, felt every day’s sunlight as a mild message to her in the way of disappointment. This was marked as an accomplishment of Radha Blank as she did well for her directorial debut.
This terrific movie won the “U.S. Dramatic Competition Directing Award” at the Sundance Film Festival, proving that Blank did a great job and made a milestone to be the second black lady to hold this award title. Blank’s quick adjustments pulled the crowd towards itself with the perfect performance that was required by the script. Blank saves the harshest criticism for herself, which adds up to the point that The Forty-Year-Old Version feels disarming. Her character revealed her struggle with ample insecurities within itself but not getting broken, sometimes shedding off tears but, more importantly, is to overcome the bullies.
After investing a lot of emotions in the journey, she learned that there is no place for “good”; if you want admiration, you need to do something different. Even at that point in her life, she decided to give up theatre because she could get a chance to be between her people – black people and start rapping, which touched a rich vein of melancholy. This left us pleasantly surprised as Blank excelled in raping and her writing skill in the movie. It left many questions unsaid for the viewers, urging them to forget their daily life for a bit and wonder why the story turned like this.
Blank tried to portray the life of a woman reaching her 40s and taking up a new career. When she takes up rapping, she needed to muster out the energy required to perform such music. This was intervened with Blank’s personal life that gave a sense of truth to the entire plot. Do not miss out on “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” which is purely a soul-baring autobiographical exercise that relates every possible thing to the person who feels inferior or rejected by society. This is the kind of upliftment that might extract Radha’s skepticism, and it appeals to everyone that doesn’t make it ring any less accurate.