If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)

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If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) – B. Jenkins

I really enjoyed Barry Jenkins’ best picture winner, Moonlight (2016), so it comes as no surprise that Beale Street is also extremely cinematic with a sort of hazy glow that places it back in our memories of a time now past.  But it is also as relevant as today’s news, given its explicit discussion of the personal and institutional/systemic racism that Black people face.  It is a deeply romantic movie too, with its main focus on the loving relationship between Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James), and the trials they face as he is unjustly accused of rape even as she discovers she is pregnant with their child.  The differing points of view on this situation (the couple is young and not married) from both sets of parents seems to interrogate an internal debate in the Black community.  Of course, all of this is from James Baldwin’s novel (which I haven’t read); Beale Street in New Orleans is suggested (in an opening quote) to represent all of the Black districts in cities around the world, thus staking a claim for universalism in the issues presented in microcosm (in NYC) here. In the end, this probably doesn’t achieve the heights that Moonlight did, as it comes to a rather anti-climactic (but realistic) conclusion, but still very much worth watching.