Tag: Aunjanue Ellis

It’s a historical drama, one that’s set around the time of the novel’s composition, but it’s equally a story about today, a movie that relies on its historical context to bring to the fore not the incidental differences but the disturbing similarities connecting those supposedly bygone days to the moment at hand. Like Baldwin’s novel, Jenkins’s film is dramatized from Tish’s point of view and in her voice. The film’s deftly and frankly complex, interwoven time structure (amplified all the more by the intricately pleated editing) thrusts the past and the present into the same plane of thought and evokes, above all, the politics of memory—the sense that memory is constitutive of history, of the history that may not be written but is nonetheless ferociously at work in the lives of people who are themselves largely left out of the official record. Tish and Fonny’s love story is rapturous and tender, a secular-holy and sweetly sexual exaltation that rises to a higher dimension with the creation of a new life: Tish’s pregnancy, which she has to announce to Fonny through the glass and over the phone of a prison visiting room. That’s where they speak, near the beginning of the film—immediately after the rhapsodic opening, of the two lovers exchanging virtual vows in the riverside glory of the New York cityscape. The young couple’s warmth and intimacy (emphasized in James Laxton’s burnished cinematography, which glows and gleams with touches of light) is a crucial counterpart to the violence at the heart of the action. The charge is brought by a Puerto Rican woman named Victoria Rogers (Emily Rios), who picked Fonny from a police lineup in which he was the only black man. Daniel is in the film only briefly, but his presence is at its very core: visiting Fonny in the Bank Street apartment, he talks of the cruel pressure by police at the time of his arrest, by the prosecution when pressing charges, by the system at large when he was forced into a plea deal for a crime that he, too, didn’t commit. The air of urgency to “If Beale Street Could Talk” arises also from Jenkins’s own success, with “Moonlight,” a film of a similar emotional intimacy and immediacy, but one in which the societal pressures and political offenses endured by its characters are, though dramatized, hardly discussed. With “If Beale Street Could Talk,” Jenkins makes explicit what’s present and clear but more implicit in the earlier film: the inseparability, in the lives of black Americans, of personal experience and political consciousness.