In the beginning of JUNGLE FEVER, the camera cranes from the window of a brownstone building into its bedroom to reveal that a man and a woman is making love, immediately calls up Hitchcock's PSYCHO (1960), while their after-the-earth-moves chitchat imitates it is an extramarital affair ("don't wake up your daughter!"), but mischievously, the pair actually is a married couple, Flipper Purify (a spiffy Snipes plays a soft-centered intellectual, a far cry from his usual muscle-bound screen image), is an African-American architect working in a white folks corporation, and his light-skinned wife Drew (McKee) is a Bloomingdale's saleswoman, even their preteen daughter has a very salutary knowledge about the birds and the bees , Spike Lee, for once, veers into the fast lane of Yuppies in Harlem.
But the presentiment of an affaire du cœur has been insidiously set off (a virile Flipper seems insatiable and over-confident in his sex appeal), and the consequential interracial one comes about quite wantonly, Flipper, whose life is the paragon of domestic bliss and high-flying stability, the stimulus of his adultery instantly baffles the audience, off which director Spike Lee doesn't blow the lid until the very end, as for his paramour, the Italian-American temp secretary Angie Tucci (Sciorra), obviously is fed up to the back teeth of her tedious existence, bogged down in the chores at home and an unfruitful and dead-end romance with the shiftless Paulie Carbone (John Turturro, another sterling interpretation of a put-upon man's simmering indignation), audience can vicariously relate to her plight,as the fling with Flipper can be an easy reprieve for her, and she has no qualms about that.
That is one reason why JUNGLE FEVER is startlingly perspicacious in the gender differentiation, while a man is a feral being and can cop off at will, a woman needs more backstory ballast to take the plunge, and from stem to stern Sciorra is defiantly cool in her demeanor, to a point she even looks too frigid to be committed to the libido-driven abandon, even she has to run the gauntlet of domestic abuse, sit through a bitter homily of whore-mongering, and realizes that their fling is nothing but a false hope to take a new leaf on her life. That said, in the end of the day, Angie's baptism of fire feels shortchanged when her story takes a back seat, as Lee, scarcely lauded for his feminist felicity, has other irons in the fire.
Deep-rooted racism, which sadly has not been ameliorated since then in the States, is granted a wider canvas in scope here, not just because the complication of the scandalous fornication, which both participants finally admit what makes them tick is the titular fever, an euphemism of sexual curiosity towards other race, other than that four-letter-word, but also through other byplays: reverse discrimination in the working place is touched on; Drew and her friends perfervidly vent their collective frustration as black women of different gradations of pigmentation and doubts about black men; Paulie, on the other hand, has his own interest in an amicable black girl Orin Goode (Ferrell), in spite of the pervading racism both at home and among his neighborly acquaintances, that milieu is a closer sibling to Lee's DO THE RIGHT THING (1989),bar the firebrand commotion in the climax.
The truth is, there is another violent sting in the tail, but that doesn't concern racism and it occurs behind the closed door, that manifests the topos rampant among the key demographic, the drug addiction, yes, the Purify family has a black sleep, the firstborn of The Good Reverend Doctor Purify and his wife (Davis and Dee, both as expected, are terrific as a stern father and a doting mother, respectively), Flipper's elder brother Gator Purify (Jackson), is an out-and -out hophead who spends the whole film soliciting money from his kindred, a breakthrough turn from Jackson which notably earned him an acting award in Cannes, not for BEST ACTOR, but a special BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR (an award they don't accord annually) , here Jackson is so lived-in in that jittery, jacked,importunate state as to dwarf Halle Berry's big screen debut as Gator's fellow crackhead into affected rants of profanity, and Lee also vehemently ram the hellscape of a crackhouse into every viewer's throat, if that doesn't dissuade you from shunning the abuse substance, nothing ever will.
referential entries: Lee's DO THE RIGHT THING (1989, 8.3/10); Charles Burnett's TO SLEEP WITH ANGER (1990, 7.4/10).
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