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.

The Rider: Chloé Zhao's film Reinvigorates the Western with Curiosity and Heart

“I hope they don’t forget about this film come Oscar season.” They’re going to forget about this film come Oscar season.” These were my thoughts only moments after watching Director Chloe Zhao’s “The Rider.” I thought these things because I genuinely felt the impact of this film that strongly, and I genuinely felt that way. I felt that way, because Zhao’s film is the kind that always gets ignored come Oscar season. It is too under seen a film, with too early a release date. It possesses the kind of beauty and craft that that hangs on to you but never stifles ( in my opinion the academy likes being stifled). Zhao’s film is patient in every possible way. It wants its story of a Rider permanently impaired by brain damage stemming from an accident dialogue, its picturesque landscapes, its characters to soak, to permeate the deeper portions of your memory…and it does.

One of the more interesting aspects of Chloé Zhao’s film is the way it mines common preconceptions of the almost folkloric type of masculinity associated with the Midwest (more specifically Cowboys) for something more flexible, something more inviting to the audience. All the typical sign posts are still there, the emotional restraint, the use of aggression as a tool, the isolation, the unsaid regulation of behaviors not in keeping with “being a man”. They are all there, but they are each of them softer, subtler, and more endearing. It can be noted in the interactions between Brady and his compadres, the attention - and care given to Lane Scott ( - another rodeo great impaired by a tragic injury), or to his beloved real life sister Lily. I would venture to say that quite possibly the most beautiful, interesting and engaging proof of this lies in relationship between Brady and his horses. Unlike in other films where this is used a s a prop to show the cowboy’s skill or to impose upon us his level of attractiveness (especially as it may pertain to an object of his affections) this is just about their relationship. I don’t need to hear how Brady does it. For me, it holds no pertinence beyond informing the rest of us how much he knows. Zhao is interested in the love, the feeling , the patience Brady possesses. The attraction she desires is more more natural and less forced through dialogue meant to “ooh” and “aw” the rest of us. Zhao is almost as interested in the horses as she is Brady, because she wants us to see how the horses react. That is how she informs the audience he knows what he is doing. It’s how she conveys to us the relationship, and the love within. Various close-ups on the eyes, - cuts to various body parts, and intimate shots affirm this. There is a scene where Brady has to put down a horse who escapes its paddock and seriously maims itself. There is a deep sadness to the scene that goes beyond Brady’s pain, because Zhao is not content to merely center Brady’s emotion. Whether its anthropomorphic or not we are given cues to empathize in a distinctive manner with this animal. To be made to feel as though this animal senses its end. That the horse is afraid and unsure of what to do. We find it just standing there, but it’s not laying down, it hasn’t given up, but it also is not running, because he’s too badly hurt. The horse wants to go on doing what it is meant to do, what it wants to do, but can’t. In providing this parallel between horse and rider , it humanizes the horse allowing for a deeper empathy than normal. It is romance in the most classical sense, and it’s one of the better displays of the relationship between horse and rider, man and beast, I’ve seen on film.

Zhao’s work is deliberately paced, has an arc, but its subtle. You’re not always aware of just where you’re going because much like the characters in the work of Director Asghar Farhadi, they seem to be figuring it out as we are. I would gather by conjecture that Zhao is the type of director that doesn’t necessarily map out the entire stories, and that she sort of allows them to tell their own story from inside her head. I don’t know that this is actually the case, but the magic of Zhao’s film is that it gives the appearance of such. Like Fahardi films, it has the feel of a documentary without taking a documentary’s actual form. It never once feels like a sprint upon a well paved track, but rather a walk along an unpaved road. At first it’s cold, you’re unsure and you wonder where it is you’re going. Sometimes you interrupt the conversation wondering how long you’ve walked thus far, but once you’ve arrived there is this intense emotionality tied to you, lingering about your person. You’ve been on this quiet, staggered, picturesque walk and you’ve learned something about everyone involved. You’ve learned about Zhao, Jandreau, and cinematographerJoshua James Richards. You’ve rediscovered through their eyes an aspect of Americana that has almost been reduced to myth and legend, here redeemed and reinvigorated by newfound curiosity , and an outside perspective .