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A scene from the third act, in which Barbara Lewis’s Hello Stranger plays on a diner jukebox, could have come straight out of American Graffiti.M ark Kermode's attitude towards movies is often autobiographical.
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Chopped-and-screwed southern hip-hop bleeds into Britell’s orchestrations, slowed and slewed to accentuate the yearning that somehow survives the transition from boyhood to manhood. Musically, Moonlight is a minor-key miracle, with the spiralling strings and plaintive piano of Nicholas Britell’s score rubbing shoulders with Mozart, Boris Gardiner and Caetano Veloso, the latter a sly nod to Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together. This environment may be harsh but there is exquisite beauty here, in the sunburst days and neon-tinged nights of Miami In one sublimely memorable moment, Laxton’s lens captures Little with his hand hanging out of the window of Juan’s ride, fingers strumming the breeze that blows from the ocean to the streets. Shooting in digital anamorphic, Laxton’s widescreen frame is expansively intimate, whether circling Juan on the streets, prowling a bully in the schoolyard or watching a quiet conversation from the back seat of a car. This environment may be harsh but there is exquisite beauty here, in the sunburst days and neon-tinged nights of Miami. Rejoining cinematographer James Laxton, Jenkins paints the screen not in the gritty, neorealist hues expected of such streetwise stories, but with the rich textures and saturated colours of a waking dream. Elsewhere, the image of his face emerging from a baptismal bowl of ice water becomes a talisman of self-definition, dispelling nightmares, signalling resolve. An early scene, tonally atuned to the currents of Carlos Reygadas’s 2007 Silent Light, sees Little learning to swim, transported to another world. The very first sound we hear is that of the ocean, a sound that recurs at key sensual moments (a fond embrace, a wet dream) and which becomes an emblem of Chiron’s subconscious. Water is a key element, from the waves that lap the beach where Chiron’s desires find ecstatic expression, to the tears that threaten to make him dissolve into drops, rolling like a river to the sea. But the poisonous taunts of nemesis Terrel (Patrick Decile) tear the pair apart, and the next time they meet, incarceration has turned the once fearful Chiron into Trevante Rhodes’s bulked-up Black, a reborn Juan with gold grills on his teeth and a familiar longing in his eyes.ĭrawing inspiration from Hou Hsiao-hsien’s temporally fractured love story Three Times, Jenkins conjures a fluid portrait of a soul in flux, ever-changing yet immutable, like the ocean. He’s befriended by Kevin, with whom he once wrestled breathlessly (like younger incarnations of Rupert and Gerald in Women in Love), and the two share more than just a secretive smoke. Jumping forward a few years, Chiron (now played by Ashton Sanders) has shed his diminutive moniker, but not his bullied status. Moonlight trailer: Barry Jenkins’s Oscar-tipped drama – video Guardian Aided by his nurturing partner, Teresa (Janelle Monáe, who also co-stars in Hidden Figures see review overleaf), Juan takes a parental interest in this lost boy, who forlornly asks: “Am I a faggot?” Imposing yet gentle, Juan is a drug dealer whose addicted clients include Little’s increasingly bedraggled mother, Paula (Naomie Harris). Inspired by playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney’s postgraduate theatre project “ In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue ”, Jenkins’s film opens with a scrawny kid nicknamed “Little” (Alex Hibbert) being chased into a derelict house from which he is rescued by Juan ( Mahershala Ali).
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The first time I saw it I swooned the second time I cried like a baby. Lending heartfelt voice to characters who have previously been silenced or sidelined, Moonlight is an astonishingly accomplished work – rich, sensuous and tactile, by turns heartbreaking and uplifting. A coming-of-age story about a young man from a hardscrabble Miami neighbourhood, this kaleidoscopic gem focuses on three periods of its subject’s life, chaptered by the different names and identities he assumes, or is given – “Little”, “Chiron” and “Black”. “W ho is you?” This question echoes throughout Moonlight, the breathtaking second feature from Medicine for Melancholy director Barry Jenkins.