MOONLIGHT

15

Check your Blu-ray case to ensure it’s not La La Land…

Moonlight and Oscar-night tango partner La La Land may not have much in common, but they are joint high rankers in the art of transcending expectation. The fizz of Damien Chazelle’s frisky mover gradually cracks, revealing currents of disappointed longing. Likewise, writer/director Barry Jenkins’ artful, light-footed riff on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s theatre piece In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue – more deceptive impressions - is gentler and more poetic than its heavyweight significance might suggest.

Even without that awards-night envelope botch, a Best Pic win for an arthouse coming-of-age film about black masculinity, class and sexuality would make news. Yet Jenkins never telegraphs his themes or resorts to quick-impact ’hood-movie melodramatics, preferring to glory in the details of character-based intimacies and intuitive form.

The three chapter headings (‘Little’, ‘Chiron’, ‘Black’; all referring to Moonlight’s hero) hum with lit-pic gravitas, yet the take-home is how smoothly Jenkins links each section.

Casting proves crucial: tasked with finding actors to play fatherless, gay Chiron over 16-ish years, Jenkins draws indelible work from Alex Hibbert (Little, shy kid), Ashton Sanders (Chiron, bullied teen) and Trevante Rhodes (Black, tough adult), each ensuring the connective tissue between life junctures rings achingly true.

In an ensemble also boasting tender input from R&B funkadelicist Janelle Monáe, Naomie Harris, André Holland and Oscar-winning support Mahershala Ali, Rhodes exemplifies Jenkins’ acute grasp of character: despite the adult armour of his ripped bod and grilled teeth, the younger Chiron still haunts his yearning eyes.

Moonlight lives in these cumulative echoes, its pulse stoked by two more MVPs. DoP James Laxton’s dreamy colours bleed between scenes like lingering emotions, tethering narrative drift to a deep sense of interior life. This Wong Kar-wai-ish steer is shared by composer Nicholas Britell, who uses chopped-and-screwed hip-hop techniques to artfully layer the emotions in his by-turns ecstatic and anxious score.

Britell’s accretions of feeling match Jenkins’ own empathetic emphasis, where an affection for lives rarely seen on-screen meets concern for their futures. It’s a mix threaded with understated eloquence, from the scene where a scared but determined Chiron is suspended in ocean waves by surrogate dad Juan (Ali) to the guardedly hopeful climax, which resists catharsis for a perfectly judged call-back – waves lapping – to innocent times. What that says about Chiron’s future is left open; Jenkins never spoonfeeds. Yet what it makes Moonlight is clear: a quietly radical beauty. Kevin Harley