As Gina Prince-Bythewood’s feature debut Love & Basketball turns 25, Robert Daniels examines the film’s tender ion, heated competition and how both romance and sport operate differently depending on your gender.
When Gina Prince-Bythewood began writing her feature debut Love & Basketball, the WNBA was a dream coming into fruition. For a time, leagues in Europe provided the best option for America’s top women college ball players to continue their careers after graduating. So when the film’s protagonist, Monica Wright (played as a child by Kyla Pratt), decides to pursue basketball, she’s chasing a ion with an uncertain future. By the end of the picture, when the prospects of a thriving women’s league is a reality, it’s clear that Prince-Bythewood’s story isn’t solely a romantic drama. It’s also a creation story for the WNBA.
For Prince-Bythewood, the semi-autobiographical nature of Love & Basketball broke two barriers. The director, who was encouraged to play sports by her adoptive parents, competed in high school basketball when women’s professional sports hadn’t yet been totally embraced. Upon her entry into film school at UCLA in 1987, Black women directors in the feature film space were still rare, too. The LA Rebellion might’ve produced Julie Dash and Barbara McCullough, but with Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground awaiting rediscovery and A Dry White Season filmmaker Euzhan Palcy just breaking into Hollywood, there weren’t many Black women helming feature film sets. So when Prince-Bythewood decided to make Love & Basketball, a kind of Black When Harry Met Sally…, it was with the knowledge of professional women’s basketball and Black women film directors both still looking to find their place.
Having said that, by the time Love & Basketball arrived, Black cinema, particularly Black romances, was having a moment. Boomerang, Poetic Justice, Jason’s Lyric, Waiting to Exhale, Love Jones and The Best Man defined the 1990s, providing a tender counterbalance to the violent hood films of the decade. None, however, were directed by a Black woman. Upon premiering at Sundance in 2000, Love & Basketball, produced by New Line Cinema and Spike Lee’s production company 40 Acres and a Mule, was the first Hollywood-backed Black romance from a Black woman director.
25 years later, the banners celebrating Love & Basketball hang high. In 2021, it was added to the Criterion Collection, and in 2024 it was included in their CC40 box set to commemorate the company’s 40th anniversary. In 2023, it was included in the Library of Congress National Film Registry. Rye Lane’s David Jonsson and A Wrinkle in Time’s Storm Reid are also big fans. Each named it their Favorite Romance Movie when talking to Letterboxd, with Jonsson calling Love & Basketball “one of the most beautiful films ever made.”
Deeply personal and richly detailed from the first frame, Love & Basketball boasts intimate world-building. It begins with an elegant crane that swoops through the upper-class Los Angeles neighborhood of Baldwin Hills. Panning down toward the right, we see Black workers unloading boxes from a green moving truck belonging to a company called Mayflower. The camera, like a bouncing ball, then flies over two Black teenagers walking with their bikes, before finally resting in the backyard of a neighboring house. Before we ever see Monica on-screen with her young rival Quincy “Q” McCall (played as a child by Glenndon Chatman), Prince-Bythewood provides a plethora of frames whose sense of the epic banal brims with information about an all-Black neighborhood Quincy’s mom proudly states was once mixed. The images also provide the particulars of the arrival of Monica’s family, whose middle-class roots make them the latest upwardly mobile settlers in this upscale new world.
Prince-Bythewood’s acute ability to blend character with place continues after an opening scene where Monica challenges Quincy to a pickup game. A competitive Quincy accidentally pushes Monica to the ground, creating a gash on her chin that leaves an indelible scar on her face and a metaphoric one on her heart.
The director’s sharp writing then takes us into Monica’s and Quincy’s respective homes. Monica lives in a vintage house, populated by vintage furniture. Her father, Nathan (Harry J. Lennix), solicits her mother, Camille (Alfre Woodard), to iron both of his shirts, informing us of the marriage’s old-fashioned values. Quincy’s parents, on the other hand, live in an almost oppressively modern home, but their union is also defined by rigid principles. Quincy’s chic stay-at-home mother Nona (Debbi Morgan) routinely acquiesces to his father Zeke (Dennis Haysbert), an NBA player who espouses gendered advice like “can’t isn’t in a man’s vocabulary.”
Within the first segment of a film which is structured in four quarters like a basketball game, we know the fissures that’ll erupt between a boyish Monica and her conventionally prissy mother, an impressionable Q and his traditionalist father, and the competitive tension that’ll come to define the ionate relationship shared by Monica and Quincy.
In the film’s second quarter, set in 1988, Monica (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy (Omar Epps) are both high school basketball players. Monica’s father s her tenacity on the court, proudly filming his daughter with a camcorder from the stands. Her mother, however, who’s closer to Monica’s sister Lena (Regina Hall), reads Toni Morrison’s novel Tar Baby the few times she does appear at Monica’s games. Monica’s mother agrees with her coaches: Monica’s fiery spirit is unbecoming of a girl athlete. Neither is correct. And it’s clear Monica isn’t solely dealing with a double standard levied at women, but the misogynoir that envisions Black women only as aggressors. Quincy, meanwhile, a celebrated recruit, is praised for his competitive moxy.
DrFlamingo writes, “My 7th grade basketball coach showed us the first half of this movie and I being really into it. I loved it and identified with the women in this film so much. Particularly Monica’s struggles to balance everyone’s expectations. The script is tight. There’s so much “show don't tell” in this, and the “show” is beautifully shot. The casting is phenomenal.”
The casting DrFlamingo points out is best felt in the excellently shot basketball scenes. Prince-Bythewood desperately wanted the gameplay to be realistic, so she zeroed in on Epps to play Q. Prior to Love & Basketball, Epps played a college football star in The Program, a baseball player in Major League II and a track star in Higher Learning. Lathan, conversely, wasn’t an athlete. She did the initial staged reading, which impressed Prince-Bythewood. But the director wanted a basketball player and considered Niesha Butler while Lathan trained with Los Angeles Sparks assistant coach Colleen Matsuhara. Lathan’s great preparation ultimately won her the part, even if her actual basketball skills were still somewhat shaky. Thankfully, she filled the role enough for Prince-Bythewood and editor Terilyn A. Shropshire not to cut around her.
The artfully crafted basketball scenes are the product of Prince-Bythewood and Shropshire’s close collaboration. Before working with Prince-Bythewood, Shropshire edited Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou, one of Prince-Bythewood’s favorite films. Since Love & Basketball, the pair have worked together on nearly all the director’s pictures.
Much of the movie’s basketball occurs in the third quarter, which sees both Monica and Quincy as student-athletes at USC. While Quincy continues being a celebrated star, Monica must make her name on a team of veterans. Thoughtfully, Prince-Bythewood doesn’t try to balance how many minutes of basketball we see each playing. She heavily focuses on Monica. In fact, on the Criterion release of the film, there’s a deleted scene of Quincy playing with his father, which points to Prince-Bythewood and Shropshire consciously working to build the film for Monica (Prince-Bythewood often credits her husband, Reggie Bythewood, for being a sounding board for honing Monica’s story).
The rhythm and intensity of the sport on-screen is also pivotal to Love & Basketball. During Monica’s final game with Crenshaw High School, Prince-Bythewood and her cinematographer, Reynaldo Villalobos (Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion), crafts Monica’s gameplay by opting for first-person perspective. The use of handheld swings viewers through the lanes and past defenders as Monica’s internal monologue provides us a window into her drive and insecurities. For Monica’s practices with USC, Prince-Bythewood and Villalobos shoot the action happening in the gym from a high angle, causing Monica to blend into the other players. The change in visual language tells the viewer that Monica is no longer the star, but one of the many fighting for playing time.
Ramón agrees: “The camerawork is electric. Prince-Bythewood places the viewer in Monica and Quincy's POV on the court, dishing out and receiving es and shooting the ball. At other times, we watch them in action, and the basketball movement is some of the best put on film.”
Most importantly, Prince-Bythewood, in her core, knows the beauty of a ball spinning in the air. Rarely does she capture anyone attempting a shot only to cut to a close-up of the ball, thereby causing the film’s physical world to be artificially rendered. Rather, the camera often follows the flight of the ball in the air from the player’s fingertips and through the hoop, allowing the poetry of the ball’s motion to flourish.
Spoilers for ‘Love & Basketball’ follow.
Prince-Bythewood’s script keenly intertwines Monica’s pursuit of basketball with romance. She spends much of the film proudly proclaiming that she’s a ball player. Of all these moments, few are more powerful than Monica and Quincy’s breakup. It’s precipitated by Monica needing to leave Quincy early to make her coach’s curfew, despite Quincy venting to her about his father cheating on his mother. Quincy resents Monica for choosing basketball over him.
It’s a difficult pill for Monica to swallow because, for much of the film, basketball has not only been her ion but also her love language. When Quincy and her first meet as kids, their relationship is sparked by a game. Later, in college, they engage in a sensual match of striptease one-on-one in Quincy’s dorm. And, of course, the final scene of the film hinges on another game of one-on-one (more on that in a bit).
In their review, TNP shares a wonderfully touching story about the film, writing, “This movie was so powerfully important to me as a kid. Hadn’t revisited it in a while. First time I ever saw a woman on screen reject the notion of prescribed femininity. Basketball was also a huge part of my life from age 8-14. AAU tournaments every weekend, drills and skills camps every summer, tryouts with the A team (never made it ☹️) — I we scrimmaged the boys team one time and I tried harder than ever to beat them because I thought if I did that they would be impressed and wanna date me 🥹.”
Though Love & Basketball operates as a romance first, Prince-Bythewood never forgets the importance of basketball, not just for Monica—who imagines herself in relation to Magic Johnson—but also for women. Monica graduates from USC in 1993. But there’s no American professional league for her to play in (the WNBA was founded in 1996). Instead, she heads to Barcelona to play. While professional women’s basketball in America struggled through fits and starts, such as the creation and closure of the Women's Professional Basketball League (1978–81), the Lega Basket Femminile in Italy started operations in 1930, the Liga Femenina de Baloncesto began thriving in Spain in 1964, and Turkey’s Women’s Basketball Super League was in full swing by 1980.
The foregrounding of that history, partly through Monica’s play in Spain, lays the groundwork for the film’s enchanting finale. Monica returns to America to visit an injured Quincy, who recently blew out his ACL. Driven by a touching heart-to-heart with her mother—who pleads with Monica to fight for Quincy—Monica challenges Quincy to a game of one-on-one for his heart in the same driveway that they met years ago. It’s an evocatively shot match, each movement happening along the curves of Monica’s and Quincy’s bodies, which seem to fold in and fight against each other. The needle drop of Zapp & Roger’s ‘I Want to Be Your Man,’ in a film defined by its music, ties together the struggle of two people who’ve been incapable of itting their love for each other now speaking the only language they know.
While the one-on-one scene is the film’s signature moment, it’s the final coda that takes Love & Basketball to another level. Unlike her mother or Quincy’s mom, Monica achieves a different life. With the WNBA now in play, Monica is a starting point guard. Quincy is sitting courtside with their daughter, ing her. Like Monica’s family arriving in that new neighborhood in a Mayflower moving truck, Monica is also exploring a new kind of upward mobility, one that offers women a professional life just coming into existence.
As Maya perfectly summarizes, “Truly incredible human drama that felt so real. An indelible, strong respect for women in sports. A fucking incredible soundtrack filled with childhood favorites that stayed on my mama’s radio. Just too fucking good to describe, but Gina truly did her big one with this one.”
