Moonlight, in three colours of blue
Moonlight · Barry Jenkins · 2016
Three actors play Chiron across three chapters, and the miracle of Moonlight is that you never doubt for a second they're the same person. Something in the eyes carries over — a watchfulness, a held breath.
Barry Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton light Black skin with a tenderness Hollywood had spent a century failing to manage. The film is drenched in blues and purples; even the violence is beautiful, which makes it worse, and truer.
At some point you gotta decide for yourself who you gonna be.
The diner scene near the end is one of the great pieces of recent American filmmaking — two men, a jukebox, decades of unspoken feeling, and a camera patient enough to let it all stay unspoken.
It won Best Picture in the most chaotic ceremony in Oscar history, and the noise around that night nearly drowned out the quiet, perfect film at its centre. Watch it again. It only deepens.
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