Category: Film

If Beale Street Could Talk is a paradox. It is a beautiful movie about ugly realities. It is light enough to take flight and simultaneously weighed down. It should be an ordinary love story of two young people, but it also can’t be because those two people are black. And it is a movie of extraordinary substance, but only sometimes. So, I loved it, but only sometimes.

One of the most significant paradoxes, is how the film can feel incredibly focused and far too broad with its characterization. This is especially true for Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan Lane), the couple around which the film (and occasionally the camera) revolves. Tish is newly pregnant. Fonny is newly imprisoned. It is a story that feels sadly inevitable. So even as Tish holds out hope for her beloved’s return, we watch with a sense of doom. They are beautiful outlines, walking down the street, hand in hand. Brightly blue and yellow clothing against the concrete sidewalk, you want to follow their silhouettes forever. But that’s all they are. Outlines. They never feel shaded in because so many things, their personalities, their histories, feel like afterthoughts in the narrative. Instead, they are constantly overshadowed by racist, societal forces that refuse to see them as people. And ironically, neither can we.

Though, Barry Jenkins certainly tries. His humanist style is apparent in every shot. When his camera focuses, really focuses, on Tish’s and Fonny’s faces, the lack of explanatory detail is utterly insignificant. Their eyes seem to contain a depth that is voiceless, a meaning that is inexplicable. When the score starts thrumming and the camera sweeps across a brick New York street, the feeling grows until it encompasses everything. Those overwhelming moments don’t by themselves, make the film incredible, but it certainly impresses upon you the importance of every moment. Time slows down, each passing moment agonized over, a memory in movement. For Tish and Fonny, after all, time is of the essence. Separation by prison glass makes every second precious. Seconds before Fonny is led away to a place where even Tish’s love cannot reach. Seconds before their time together is a distant memory.

The film’s greatest accomplishment, though, is forming characters around the Tish and Fonny so their relationship never becomes claustrophobic. In that way, the movie emphasizes familial love as much as romantic much to its advantage. Unlike Tish, her parents have long seen the world as it is. So, their happiness at the imminent birth is both incredibly joyous and a cautious projection. Regina King as Tish’s mom stands unwaveringly in her role, her eyes swimming with hidden vulnerabilities. And as Tish’s father, Coleman Douglas is a pillar of strength, going so far as to sell stolen merchandise to support the increasingly heavy fees for the lawyer. Every moment that the world crumbles, there is a willing hand, reaching out to take on another burden.

A love story above all, If Beale Street Could Talk wanders in a world of color without ever hesitating to explore the dark corners. It is, after all, in the hidden spaces where love blossoms best. In a cramped apartment room where Tish and Fonny finally connect. In a family home, where the celebration for a new member begins with a toast. In these places, there can be no police interference or shady justice systems. In these places, love triumphs.

So often I am struck by how little film makers do with their medium. It is an art form that combines visual and audio elements more immersively than reading a book or perusing an gallery can really claim to do. Yet we end up with so many American Pie types, popular but containing no real depth. Emotion and meaning are dulled when movies become uniform in this way, and their power to deeply affect dies. Moreover, even the aesthetic capabilities of the film medium are often ignored, settling for unimaginative school or office buildings, with costume designers seeking normalcy so fervently that their characters’ dress becomes boring.

Fortunately, there are some who understand the abilities film has to deeply move its audience. All five of Academy Award-winning live action short films (Mother, Fauve, Marguerite, Detainment, and Skin) provoked a larger range of emotions in me than nearly any other movie I’ve ever seen. Mother gave me a feeling of creeping cold desolation, with its wide sweeping gaze at the empty beach in the beginning and end. Using the point of view of the lost boy’s mother gives the audience a closer look into her desperation and helplessness. We listen to him with her, clinging onto every word his soft voice says through the phone. The camera work is disorienting, making us panicky with the mother and grandmother as the reality of the situation sets in.

In Fauve, there are two drastically different sceneries: the wildly beautiful Canadian countryside (wildflowers, long grasses, mountains) and a stark mine site (plain grey earth for what seems like miles on all sides, reminiscent of an alien planet). The scenes in the mine site seem surreal compared to the lushness of the fields the boys travel through to get there. I almost expected the earth to begin to rumble and rise, revealing itself to be some enormous living creature.

Marguerite was the only one to make me cry, and one of the few movies that have ever made me cry. The loneliness she must have felt moved past the screen and into the most melancholy part of my mind. It is unclear whether she loved again after her soulmate was married, but because she lived alone in the movie, it seemed her companionless existence had been eternal. The whole movie had me feeling cold: the slowness of all her actions, the neatness of each room in the house, the millions of wrinkles lining her face.

I felt least connected to Detainment, though it disturbed me more fully than the true crime documentaries on TV have ever done. The documentary-esque style of the piece did not go well with the narrative tone, and the same few images of the boys abducting the baby were played over and over again, without adding much value to the film. However, the filmmakers played on the boys’ conflicting stories, which helped create an uncertain, uneasy feeling.

Skin was by far the most brilliant star of the five. It played on racism in modern America, the psychology of childhood development, gun politics and violence, the idea of innocence and how easily it can be destroyed, the uncertainty of placing blame…I could go on. It made me question my own life and thoughts, those of my family, of the country and the greater world. I had to catch myself when I unconciously started distancing myself from the white family’s attitudes and actions, recognizing the weakness in that thought, the automatic stereotypes I’d applied to make myself feel better. And when the two young boys locked eyes for the second time, I was haunted. Somehow within the film’s disturbing content, there was still an attention to lighting and landscape details that made it uncomfortably beautiful, the exquisite drip of blood, the lonely desert nothingness.