‘If Beale St Could Talk’ and Radical Love

A stirring follow-up to his Best Picture Winning, Moonlight, Barry Jenkins gives us a sensual dedication to love in intimate spaces that is both the perfect movie for a date night and a great film to cry alone to. 

In 2016, Moonlight broke the internet and the hearts of many when it snubbed La La Land and took the prize for Best Picture. Three years on, Barry Jenkins’ most recent project makes it clear: Barry Jenkins just loves love.

In Moonlight, love is radical, political and deeply sensual. It encircles characters as they move through a world that demonises them. In a lot of ways, If Beale Street Could Talk feels like a continuation of these ideas.

Based on the novel of the same name by James Baldwin, the film follows young power couple, Tish and Fonny (played by KiKi Layne and Stephan James), as they navigate their burgeoning romance in 1970s Harlem. Their relationship develops before us, beautifully captured by cinematographer James Laxton, and framed by the most sensually captured smoke plumes I’ve ever seen (those vape trick videos fail to hold a candle to this sexy smokiness). But their relationship becomes increasingly aloof to us as the film progresses; there is a sense that, within the warm colour palette and pastel costuming of their environment, Tish and Fonny inhabit their own personal space that they’ve chosen to fill with each other. Even as they encounter a political system that seeks to imprison Fonny and attack this space, it encircles the film like the persevering smell from a smoke plume.

Jenkins shows us a family home, a sexual space and countless private moments that empower his characters. Then, he shows us the system that clips at the heels, knocks at the door and infiltrates these spaces in order to disempower these characters. But still, there are small moments in the film, and within these seemingly compromised spaces, that make it clear: these spaces and experiences will adapt and persevere. Taking off a wig, embracing in an empty loft, cooking in a basement, and a family dinner, are each given the time to sit in the mesmerising world Jenkins has created. So that, in the visitor’s room of a prison, we bear witness to a place where love can endure, and two people can find a way to connect.

If you’ve seen If Beale Street Could Talk, let us know what you thought of Barry Jenkins latest love in the comments.