If Beale Street Could Talk: Barry Loves Us.

If Beale Street Could Talk :

Barry loves us.

Some time ago, while pondering our significant existence in this desolate wilderness of anger and violence called America, a large congregation of black people all at once shouted from our hearts “We are not a monolith” from beneath the shadow of the mountain of white supremacy.. or so the bard says. Sometimes I think of great political cinema in this way. Of course all cinema is political in some manner of shape or form, but I mean here that kind of cinema that intends with the same single mindedness and will one might see in a boxing ring, and with the same sort of craft, skill, beauty and violence. Black people are not a monolith, and try as Hollywood may, neither is our cinema. As the breadth, impact, frequency, and quantity of black creators and artist in front of and behind the camera expands black cinema to the top of, and into the mainstream conscious of American cinema , I believe we are witnessing maybe the most important wave in black cinema to date and Barry Jenkins is one of the people at the forefront of that. But my introduction is actually a digression. I’m not here to talk about the new wave of black auteurs set to engulf hollywood in black sensibilities and expression through the lens of film. Im here to talk about one film, one movie from this one director: Barry Jenkins…”If Beale Street Could Talk”.

It took me a bit to settle into what Beale street was, or rather what it was going to say to me. At first I must admit it felt rather stiltish. The one real threat that looms from Jenkins slow patient style as a director. The opening scene felt rather like a play, the rhythm felt much the same, the acting (save for Regina King) felt slightly off key. This kind of thing is something I’ve come to expect from Spike Lee. Spike and his chaotic, spastic, improvisational cinematic jazz, is always good for a erratic bridge or an off key intro. But judging from Moonlight , so affected by Moonlight, admittedly biased by Moonlight, I came in expecting every note to be properly placed, every section to feel its relation to the other.. I expected a symphony. In truth I feel I got both, I just had to settle into the experience, and more importantly I got a beautiful encapsulation of the black experience, one that made me feel as though I were on the inside of a snow globe of our past , present, and future in this country as it fell around my head, in my hands, and on my tongue.

If Spike Lee is black anger and movement in image, then Barry Jenkins is longing and stillness. Or better still if a Spike Lee image says it all, then a Barry Jenkins image leaves a lot unsaid. Jenkins seems to be always be reaching for something larger, something more nebulous. It’s quiet but whats behind it is loud. With Jenkins, thus far into his career, its never obvious what exactly he wants you to know, but you almost always feel it. Start with something as basic as costuming, where Barry wants to be true to the era, but the costuming feels less clear, and subsequently it feels like it could be any number of eras, the 50’s, 60’s 80’s, it could even pass for now. He doesn’t seem to want you to get bogged down in time.

Its interesting, and indicative of the difference in style that both Black KKKlansman an If Beale Street Could Talk are set in the same era (The 70’s) and yet one is more assertive about which era its set in and the other (If Beale Street) is much less so.

This is a contrast not a competition. A declaration of the difference in style I see between two American artist speaking our universal language in different dialects, and through the lens of different emotions. Jenkins imagery, his language is minimalist, but the emotion behind them is strong, deep like a baritone, and it shakes the cobwebs and dust from feelings you may have forgotten about during your own experience here in America. There was a scene involving Tish (Kiki Layne) explaining her experience working behind the fragrance counter of a department store that you could silence without the dialogue and still come away with exactly what is being expressed in the dialogue. Layne gives a smile so layered, that as Jenkins makes the brilliant decision to move to an extreme close up I felt as though I passed through time experiencing the hurt, the restraint, the repression of years of the policing of black emotion. I instantly recalled my co-worker at a hotel I worked at being told she didn’t smile enough and that she had a “clear attitude” towards the guest, when all I saw her do is smile and try harder than she needed to, to meet the demands of this white couple who were all but too eager to project their misery unto my co-worker’s well manicured blank canvas and still her blackness offended their sensibilities. Like a javelin into the dragon scale of their private hurt. If they weren’t smiling why should she?

Watching Beale street I felt our collective sorrow, I felt our long suffering , but I also felt our ingenuity, our collective hopes and dreams, and our determination. I felt it in the montage depicting two black fathers as they stole from their place of work to provide a legal defense for a child so damned by society it may all be for nought anyway. In the longing, compassionate eyes of Regina King in an alley somewhere in Puerto Rico pleading for a stay of execution to a woman herself drowning somewhere in the middle of where the sea of white supremacy meets the river of rape culture and anti blackness. I saw it the beauty and the dignity of black style, and of black art that exists in our refusal to look down even as we are down. In our insistence on creating something out of nothing as was the case with Fonny’s (Stephen James) art. Barry Jenkins frames our community, and in doing so implies our isolation, our borders. He repeatedly uses close ups, drowning out the noise of the background. He reads us poetry from our dearest friends like Baldwin in our living room, reminding us of the best, and the worst of our collective self, of pain, and of joy. He sits us down and turns on any variation of jazz and classical music, and he paints us in colors so vivid we forget just how dark it is in this cramped space of dictated blackness. Watching If Beale Street could talk was the warmest of experiences, it was escapism in its highest form. Not thenmomd that acts as a soft or hard lie to get your mind off your troubles. The kind that takes you somewhere else firmly IN your reality but feels like a place only you have found, where everything just stops and for a moment its just us. Leaving by telling us we were never really here, never really just this, or that. We were always more, and so we always made the most out our experiences, and it is very intimate, and it feels like its just us, and when it ends, sad as it ends, it feels like love, it feels like care, even as it tells it to us straight and true, and I sat with this as the screen blackened and I sat there in its blackness welling up with alll the left over emotion this movie provides and as it ended I thought “Barry loves us” as most great black directors do, but it’s such a kind reverent love its something so different from what we have experienced to date its clearly his. Yeah Barry Loves Us.