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‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ and the power of revolutionary love

Virginia Film Festival presents the next masterpiece from director Barry Jenkins

<p>Virginia Film Festival presented "If Beale Street Could Talk" on its final day.</p>

Virginia Film Festival presented "If Beale Street Could Talk" on its final day.

“Beale Street…is synonymous with the blues,” Associate Professor Maurice Wallace said as he introduced “If Beale Street Could Talk” — director Barry Jenkins’ latest since winning the Best Picture Oscar for “Moonlight” in 2016 — to the eager audience. Based on James Baldwin’s fifth novel of the same name, “If Beale Street Could Talk” was presented by the Virginia Film Festival on its final day Nov. 4 as part of the “Race in America” series. 

The film flows with melancholy hopefulness, anchored with deep roots in the artistic and cultural traditions of African-American creators. Its mournful, gut-wrenching journey is interwoven with profound beauty and a sense of shared responsibility and love. The best words to describe Jenkins’s picture were used by Wallace in his introductory description of Baldwin’s character as a writer — a story of “righteous, cutting, prophetic eloquence” transcending the decades of separation between the book and the film. 

“If Beale Street Could Talk” follows Tish Rivers (Kiki Lane), a young woman from Harlem who attempts to find evidence to exonerate her fiancé, Fonny (Stephan James), after he is imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. While Fonny awaits trial, Tish discovers she is pregnant with their first child. Jenkins entwines Tish’s search for the truth with Fonny and Tish’s love story, combining the two narratives with heartbreaking effect. 

“If Beale Street Could Talk” is visual music, with interludes of romance and despair and aspiration and tragedy. It depicts the act of revolutionary love between black people and the captivity of racism which tries to corrupt the most fundamental aspect of human connection. Jenkins’s film is an exquisite, delicately-crafted ode to family and partnership and resilience in the face of overwhelming fear of a system decidedly against those things. 

Tish’s mother, Sharon (Regina King), says as much. “I know suffering, and I know that it ends,” she reminds her daughter. King’s performance is a powerful, graceful turn for the magnetic actress and is complemented by the work of Colman Domingo, who plays opposite her as Tish’s father, Joseph. Their relationship with each other — as well as their support of Tish — provide for many of the profound moments in the film, providing examples of the multiplicities of love in the story.

Visually, “If Beale Street Could Talk” is enchanting. The cinematography of James Laxton — who has also worked with Jenkins on his two previous features, “Moonlight” (2016) and “Medicine for Melancholy” (2008) — is captivating and tear-inducing in its ability to showcase the beauty of love, frustrating tragedy and righteous anger. Costume designer Caroline Eselin does striking, nuanced work with color within the period-appropriate dress of the 1970s. 

The sound and score of the film complete the trifecta of emotional communication in the film. Nicholas Britell’s music punctuates “If Beale Street Could Talk” with empathy, at times pausing the action to celebrate beauty and sadness or narrating the love between parent and child or husband and wife. 

For its nearly two-hour runtime, “If Beale Street Could Talk” possesses an air of uncertainty. Tish’s desperation is almost meandering as the months of her pregnancy stretch on and her search continues. Jenkins’s direction is not a race against the clock — it’s a rumination on the importance of time once its been unjustly taken away, never to be returned. To a viewer, it may come off as an unsatisfying narrative, but in actuality, it is the truth of the still urgent struggle against racism and systemic injustice.

In “If Beale Street Could Talk,” Jenkins honors the traditions of Baldwin in purest form, putting ugly truth on screen with pure beauty and celebrating the resilience of empathy and love.  

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