IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK Starring Regina King. Rated PG
“IF BEALE STREET could talk/ Married men would have to take their beds and walk/except one or two who never drink booze/and the blind man on the corner who sings the ‘Beale Street Blues’.” That’s from W.C. Handy’s “Beale Street Blues”, and the 1917 song’s self-referencing lines obviously inspired transcendent writer James Baldwin to name his 1974 novel after them.
The main drag of Memphis’s entertainment district was once synonymous with African-american aspirations and creativity, weighed down by institutionalized violence and crime. Baldwin wrote that all black folks in the New World were born on a Beale Street of some kind. And while Moonlight writer-director Barry Jenkins certainly gets the aspirational part of Baldwin’s story, his languid new movie somehow misses the rhythm of the street.
Vivacious newcomer Kiki Layne and talented Canadian Stephan James (Race, Selma) play 19-year-old Tish Rivers and slightly older Fonny Hunt, star-crossed lovers in ’70s Harlem. Fonny left his old haunts for a crummy walkup in Greenwich Village (as Baldwin did before him), to work as a sculptor. But his plans are thwarted by a racist cop (a cartoonish Ed Skrein), who frames him for raping a Puerto Rican woman in a faraway part of town.
That doesn’t leave much room for a love story, so Jenkins chops up the tale into time-jumping pieces so we can spend more minutes with the young lovers and their families. That strategy leads to many repetitive and sluggishly staged scenes in which the participants whisper non-baldwinian words of devotion, only to have their resolve tested at every turn.
The book is narrated by the newly pregnant Tish, who sometimes assumes a more omniscient voice to describe cruel social machinations beyond her personal experience. Here, the narrator is multitracked and drenched in reverb, turning Tish into a kind of Greek chorus murmuring wise (if hard-to-follow) thoughts from a safe distance—an apt analogy for the meticulously artdirected movie, which aestheticizes suffering without exploring it.
Beale Street’s theatrically placid two hours are padded with needless cameos, including Dave Franco as a friendly Jewish landlord and Narcos star Pedro Pascal, who shows up during a side trip to Puerto Rico that works only as a vehicle to display Regina King’s considerable mettle as Tish’s tough-talking mother. There are Coltrane and Nina Simone ballads to underline the elegance of our kind protagonists, but the dirgelike soundtrack largely suggests nostalgia and resignation. The most shocking thing about Baldwin’s original story is that it could have been updated to the noisy present without changing a single element. For some reason, however, Jenkins freezes everything in amber, and the blind man never sings.
A BAKER’S apprentice takes an early-morning smoke break atop his boss’s building and never makes it back to work. That’s because Teco (Italian TV star Giacomo Ferrara) gets distracted by a huge seagull crash-landing on a nearby roof and then gets sucked into a bizarre kind of overworld he (and we) never knew existed.
Look Up is a highly imaginative first feature for young writer-director Fulvio Risuleo, who here combines his obvious love of classic cinema with a taste for the cryptically surreal. Cinephiles will find hints of fantastic Fellini, deadpan Jim Jarmusch, and humanistic Wim Wenders floating throughout this journey, which manages to be wildly picaresque, even though easygoing Teco—sporting a Kaurismäki pompadour that remains unruffled throughout—never strays more than a few hundred yards away from home base.
The film was cowritten with Andrea Sorini, who made the recent Baikonur, Earth, another provocative study of the contrast between heavenly pursuits and earthier realities. Recalling Baikonur’s grounded Soviet cosmonaut program, seagulls turn out to be man-made drones; in fact, they contain mummified artifacts left over, perhaps, from earlier human endeavours. This is explained to Teco by an androgynous little girl (Alida Baldari Calabria) who carries her pet chicken everywhere and leads him to a gang of rooftop bambini building a secret rocket to the moon.
Wearing elaborately coloured paper-bag masks, the kids are locked in mortal combat with local nuns who are also after the seagull messengers—and all the wine they can drink, as we learn when Teco stumbles into a hidden cabaret. There, strange music is performed by electronic composer Sun Araw, who also supplies the appropriately disorienting soundtrack.
This visit comes after Teco passes out in the tucked-away garden of a beekeeping hermit played by whitebearded Lou Castel, a Swedish actor whose Italian-neorealist lineage goes all the way back to 1965’s Fists in the Pocket. He also prowls heating ducts with a French parachutist (Aurélia Poirier) escaping her Czech boyfriend (Ivan Franek), and runs into nudist twins and other weird characters. The film’s structural weaknesses are exposed during halting multilingual conversations that don’t really amount to much. But at less than 90 minutes of breezy, children’s-book fun, it announces Risuleo as a not-tooserious talent to watch.