Tag: Moonlight

If Beale Street Could Talk

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The couple walks along. They’re completely in love. “Are you ready for this?”, asks Fonny (Stephan James). “I’ve never been more ready for anything in my whole life”, replies Tish (newcomer KiKi Layne).

Welcome to a movie that is at once one of the most romantic of the year – out just in time for Valentine’s Day – and a gritty indictment of the way black people are treated in the USA. Which sounds a pretty unlikely mix, but then Barry Jenkins is hardly an average director. His Best Picture Oscar winning Moonlight (2016) proved this for this writer by having one character at three different ages played by three actors and making that potentially disastrous proposition work so brilliantly on the screen.

If Beale Street Could Talk‘s source material is a 1974 novel set in Harlem by US writer James Baldwin (1924-1987) who explored the black experience in some considerable depth and is the subject of highly recommended documentary I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2017). The novel is Baldwin‘s response to the incarceration of black people for crimes they have not committed by a system, as he sees it, designed to keep them in their place through systematic abuse and mistreatment. Baldwin has a gift for writing about people, what makes them tick, their good and bad qualities.

The film’s romantic opening soon gives way to something else: Tish visits Fonny, in prison for a crime he did not commit, to tell him she’s going to have his baby. The only way they can communicate is through a glass partition. They’ve been friends since childhood and are now partners as adults. But they’re not married and she’s got to tell her and his parents about the baby. And the family have to find a way to get him out of prison.

The narrative is a clever exercise in parallel editing. One strand shows Tish and Fonny’s life together, growing into love, finding an apartment, his being picked on by a racist cop (Ed Skrein). The other shows Tish’s story following Fonny’s incarceration, her telling both their families about the baby, the ongoing life process of pregnancy, birth and raising a son, fighting for her partner’s release with her mother’s help.

The two leads are terrific. KiKi Layne is a real find, capturing a mixture of innocence and fragility on the one hand and a perseverance and strength on the other. The latter is something Tish gets from her parents, especially her mother Sharon (Regina King) who at one point has to fly to Puerto Rico to persuade gone to earth witness Victoria Rogers (Emily Rios) to testify that Fonny wasn’t the man who raped her.

Although he gets less screen time, Stephan James as Fonny is good too whether showing Fonny’s essential optimism in his life in the outside world or his attempt to hold himself together as prison life threatens to make him fall apart, the latter experience only really seen from Tish’s side of the glass partition when she visits him. (There is no attempt to otherwise show Fonny’s prison life beyond such visitation scenes, no way the film might be described as a prison movie).

In addition there are numerous impressive bit parts – the film is surely destined to become a future Who’s Who of Black US acting talent – and other aspects of the production do it proud too. The sequence where first Tish’s family then Fonny’s react to the news of her pregnancy deserves a special mention, there being much to say about the way Tish’s family, despite being oppressed by a system rigged against their race, practise life-affirming values in marked contrast to Fonny’s family where father is driven to rage by feelings of powerlessness while mother and daughters use legalistic Biblical language to lord it over the “sinful” Tish.

Special mentions should go to James Laxton’s cinematography for juxtaposing the lush, vivid palette of a seventies Harlem romance against the harsh, brutal colours of an oppressive prison environment (exactly the qualities that seemed to be absent from the cinematography of that other recent, period New York movie Can You Ever Forgive Me?) and an achingly beautiful score by Nicholas Britell. That said, this is one of those movies where all the technical people and their departments, those unsung, behind the scenes heroes of movie-making, each more than pull their individual weight to contribute to a whole that adds up to far, far more than the (considerable) sum of its parts.

This remarkable film consolidates Barry Jenkins’ achievement in Moonlight and deserves to be even more widely seen, not only because it so beautifully articulates the black experience in the racist society that is the USA but also because it’s so well put together in terms of all aspects of movie-making craft. The cast, main and bit parts, are to die for and it’s a great introduction to the writings of James Baldwin to boot. See it.

If Beale Street Could Talk is out in the UK on Friday, February 8th. On VoD on Friday, June 21st.

Moonlight and intersectionality

Posted on by victorfraga

Do you know what “intersectionality” means?

The concept refers to the overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage, in terms of race, class, gender/sexuality. For example: “female Latin”, “transgender Asian “and “gay Black” are intersectional subgroups. But don’t worry in case you have never come across this clunky 17-letter word and tongue-twister. I had never seen it myself until a couple of days ago, when a very angry readers confronted me just on Twitter about my review of Moonlight (Barry Jenkins), which received the Best Picture Oscar last night.

In my piece about the upset Oscar-winning movie about a gay Black in Florida (click here in order to accede to the review page) I did not acknowledge intersectionality. Instead, I addressed gay rights and black rights separately. This infuriated a couple of readers, which described the piece as offensive and irresponsible. One of them went one step further and questioned whether DMovies had any black gay writers because he believe that “intersectionality is key”. I replied that we have one gay black writer, plus several gay and black writers (I’m a gay male myself). Not a bad achievement for a nascent and small organisation, I opined.

Diversity is of course a very loose term, used to describe anything vaguely multicultural, international or anti-discriminatory. It is therefore necessary to qualify it, and intersectionality is a fitting answer to that. It enables us to describe the demographics of diversity in minute detail. I’m a gay Latin, it seems. Although I would personally shun the attribute: I think it’s too granular and limiting.

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Scene from 2017 Best Picture Oscar winner Moonlight

A weapon can backfire

Intersectionality (or intersectionability, as some pundits prefer) has plenty of benefits to offer to liberals. It improves public awareness of groups hitherto invisible and voiceless, pushing their requirements up a government’s agenda. But intersectionality also has at least two major problems which could backfire. So we need to think about it a little before ranting and demanding intersectionality in every sphere of our society.

Firstly, just like diversity, intersectionality is a very vague term. Some of the subgroups already have a long history of activism as well as significant representation in film (note: significant does not mean sufficient). These include lesbians, gay men, black women, etc. London has the firmly established Images of Black Film Festival, an event taking place every year and entirely dedicated to a subgroup. On the other hand, other subgroups are much smaller and it’s borderline impossible to vouch for their representation in film: gay Black, Asian transexual, Latin intersex, and so on. Our concepts of gender and sexuality are so fluid nowadays that it would be both difficult and counterproductive to articulate these smaller groups in the same way lesbians have articulated their movement throughout the decades. One size does not fit all.

Secondly, and far more importantly, is the issue of sectarianism. I have never fully supported the quota and positive discrimination agenda. By principle, I never fill out the ethnicity forms which are conspicuous in the UK – even knowing that I would probably benefit from doing it (as I’m in a minority group). But I do recognise that quotas for black and mixed race people in universities have helped to improve equality in Brazil, the country where I come from. I confess that that I still haven’t made up my mind about the controversial topic. What I don’t approve is sectarianism.

In order to explain myself, I’ll go back to the angry reader. While I recognise that his anger has very genuine reasons and that as a black gay he is doubly vulnerable to prejudice, I do not approve of mandatory intersectionability. DMovies does in fact have a black gay writer (his name is Almiro Andrade), but what if we didn’t? As the company director, I never set out to find a black gay writer. We can’t possibly cater for representatives of all subgroups. We would need a black person for each gender, class and sexuality. Here’s a list of the 58 gender options for Facebook users, just to give you an idea of how complex and non-binary these concepts are.

Extreme demands for representation can pulverise the diversity movement and alienate your likely supporters. And we’ll end up with further segregation, not less. So my message to intersectionality champions is: pick your enemies more wisely. Intersectionality should never become intersectionihilism.

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Barry Jenkins holda his Oscar statuette

The moon shines on gay Blacks

The Best Picture Oscar for Moonlight is a tremendous achievement, and also a deeply political act. La La Land would have represented a victory of the status quo: white and hetero. With Moonlight, the Academy killed two birds with one stone: the rabid eagle of racism and the ugly vulture of homophobia. This is a direct response to the #OscarSoWhite movement from last year and to the 2006 Oscars – when Crash (Paul Haggis) received the Best Picture Award instead of the Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee’s gay romance was the clear favourite to win the prize).

Moonlight is indeed a very good movie, but also not without flaws – such as the casting and the soundtrack (see my review). There is no doubt that its subject matter helped to catapult it to the top. And why shouldn’t it? Cinema is a powerful transformational weapon, and we should have no qualms at using it in order to make a statement and demand change. I congratulate both the filmmaker Barry Jenkins and the Oscars.

So, is Moonlight ultimately an achievement for gay blacks, for gays or for blacks? The answer is, of course, all three. More broadly, it’s also a victory for all liberals, as it’s also a statement against Donald Trump’s extremely reactionary, divisive and dangerous politics. We just have to be careful as not to alienate other liberal-thinking groups with a parochial rhetoric, thereby fueling division, plus enabling the deeply reactionary concept of reserve discrimination, and other elusive Trumpian platitudes. The alt-right is ready to seize the argument in their favour at any given opportunity, and they would love to claim that Moonlight is trying to impose a black gay dictatorship upon us. Let’s not give them the opportunity to do so.

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Whether you are an enthusiastic champion of intersectionality or a disbeliever, one thing is almost certain. Get used to this strange vocab (and the alternative “intersectionability”; I gathered that both mean virtually the same). These two terms are likely to become buzzwords and conversation topics around the best dinner tables, pubs and events in this country and beyond!

Moonlight

Posted on by victorfraga

Until the 19th century many people used to think that moonlight could drive you insane, and many mentally-ill people were locked inside without a view of the earth’s only natural satellite. Hence the expression “lunatic” and “moonstruck”. But the moonlight can also provide brightness and save lives, particularly if you are lost in a dark forest in the middle of the night. This American drama is full of hope for the marginalised gay and black Americans, so that they don’t succumb to the old-fashioned powers of the moon.

Moonlight tells the story of Chiron at three stages of his life: childhood, adolescence and adulthood (played by a different actor at each stage). He is constantly seeking maternal love and affection, but his mother constantly shuns him in favour of her drug addiction. He ironically finds solace with a local drug dealer, who becomes a provisional father figure to the young black boy. He learns from him that his mother is his client and also, more significantly, the meaning of the word “faggot”. “It is a word to make gay people feel bad about themselves”, the unexpectedly gentle and caring man explains.

The community in which Chiron live is highly insular. White people are conspicuous in the absence, they are to be seen nowhere – not even in the background. Chiron proudly identifies himself as black, so race is indeed a main focus of the movie. This community is very violent, and Chiron is often a victim of beating in his teenage years, as his bullies suspect that he is a homosexual.

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Trevante Rhodes play an adult Chiron

Despite not being a drug addict and a perpetrator of violence, Chiron also has problems with the police. A crime record is not unusual in a revolving-doors culture as this. Chiron’s challenge is to break the cycle, and prevent homophobia and violence to prevail in his life. The director Barry Jenkins deftly plays with music and silence in order to convey a sense of nervousness and uncertainty. The writing is on the wall: it’s difficult to be black in the US, but it’s far more challenging to be openly gay, particularly if you live in a drug-ridden and insular community of Florida. Intersectionality is also a key issue, as being black and gay poses further challenges to the character.

Moonlight has it shortcomings, such as the two actors playing Chiron’s lover at different ages looking nothing like each other. The soundtrack – a mixture of opera, classic music, R&B and even the classic Caetano Veloso’s ‘Cucurrucucu Paloma’ – is mostly effective, but at times slips into a melodramatic tone, not in line with the rest of the movie. Still a powerful human experience whether or not you are black and gay.

Moonlight was screened as part of the Toronto International Film Festival, and it also showed as part of the BFI London Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It was released in UK cinemas in February 2017, the same month as it won the Best Picture Oscar after a wrong announcement erroniously crowned La La Land (Damien Chazelle). The actor Mahershala Ali, who plays the drug dealer Chiron meets as a child (pictured above), deservingly won the Best Supporting Actor statuette.

And also don’t forget to watch the film trailer below:

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