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February 6, 2019
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a nnapurna p iCtures
Stephan James
and Kiki Lane star
as a young couple
relying on their love
to sustain them
through unspeakable
hardships in “If Beale
Street Could Talk.”
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If Beale Street Could Talk
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Love survives hardships in top film from 2018
D arleen o rtega
Based on the novel by James
Baldwin, the prophet of modern
African American thought and
literature, “If Beale Street Could
Talk” (number 2 on my list of the
best films of 2018) opens with this
quote from Baldwin:
“Beale Street is a street in
New Orleans, where my father,
where Louis Armstrong and the
jazz were born. Every black per-
son born in America was born
on Beale Street, born in the back
neighborhood of some American
city, whether in Jackson, Missis-
sippi, or in Harlem, New York.
Beale Street is our legacy. This
novel deals with the impossibility
and the possibility, the absolute
necessity, to give expression to
this legacy.”
The great writer-director Barry
Jenkins (whom Hollywood ap-
pallingly recognized with only an
Oscar nomination for screenwrit-
by
ing, but not for best director and
not for the picture itself) adapted
Baldwin’s novel before receiving
permission from Baldwin’s es-
tate to film it. And though there
is no record of a Beale Street in
New Orleans, what Baldwin cre-
ated and Jenkins has brought to
the screen pulses with the urgen-
cy of imparting what is true about
the lived experience of American
blacks. Beale Street is the back
street--”Backatown,” as they
would say in New Orleans--where
blacks are born and are generally
forced to live, save for those few
who become useful to white su-
premacy in some way. Baldwin
sought to express what would be
heard about black experience if
anyone would listen, and Jenkins’
film evokes that intention with
sound, images and care that will
break your heart if you let it.
And a broken heart is the only
appropriate response to this story
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of two young people, Fonny and
Tish, who have only love to sus-
tain them through unspeakable
hardships that are thrust upon
them, as they are upon black peo-
ple in America to this day. Their
love is what grounds the story
because it is so clearly what en-
ables the young lovers to with-
stand, without entirely breaking,
the blows that would and do break
many others--the daily indignities,
the violations of their bodies, the
constant messages that, as Tish ex-
plains, black people receive from
childhood--”that they weren’t
worth shit--and everything around
them proved it.”
The love story of Fonny and
Tish (a luminous Stephan James
and Kiki Layne) works in anoth-
er important way: it helps us to
grieve as we should for their sto-
len potential. From the very begin-
ning, the film cuts back and forth
between achingly beautiful scenes
of a love built on friendship forged
as children, and Tish’s visits to the
jail where Fonny is awaiting trial
for a brutal rape that he did not
commit. It lingers over their early
and sweet longing, the tenderness
of recognition that they belong to
each other, the grasping for hope
and for dreams of a future beyond
what the culture has imagined for
them. The ways they reach for one
another are imbued with an appro-
priate sense of reverence; some-
how these two have discovered
and reflect back to each other what
so many black young people have
been deprived of seeing: their in-
herent beauty and worth.
There is nobody better than
C ontinueD on p age 14