Barry Jenkins follows up his Academy Award winning Best Picture Moonlight with If Beale Street Could Talk and like that film, it tackles some serious subject matter. There are no easy outs and no fairy tale endings to help lift the viewer. These are hard truths.
Set in seventies America, Alonzo ‘Fonny’ Hunt (Stephan James), a man of colour is falsely accused of rape and get chewed up by the system. It’s a slow grind for both the incarcerated and the viewer. Even the love and effort of both of his families, his and hers, cannot sway the outcome.
Filmed with subdued colour pallets and dimly lit scenes, we see the affection that Fonny feels for Clementine ‘Tish’ Rivers (KiKi Layne) but their young love is anything but easy and carefree. New York in the seventies was ripe with racial prejudice and it negatively impacts the young couple as almost every turn. After a run-in with a white police officer played by Ed Skrein, Fonny becomes a marked man and ends up falsely accused and incarcerated.
The film is told in a non-linear fashion and provides background on the couple’s transition from childhood friends to young lovers. It’s not an easy watch and it never lets you approach it without a sense of the horrors that racism imparts on our world. Even with the all difficulties and sorrows that these families go through, their love for one another remains. Love does conquer all.
Rob Hudson
www.bealestreetmovie.com.au
