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It's amazing to think that the work of one of the greatest American writers never been adapted in English for the big screen before, but this is the case of James Baldwin – so far, of course. For his first film after the best winning film MoonlightBarry Jenkins rose to the challenge of translating Baldwin into theaters. Adapted from the novel of the same name published in 1974 by the late writer, Jenkins If Beale Street could speak brings Harlem from the 70s to life in all its lush, golden beauty.
The film is told from the point of view of Tish, played wonderfully by newcomer Kiki Layne, a 19-year-old woman engaged to Fonny, a 22-year-old sculptor played by Back homeStephan James. After Fonny has been arrested and sent to jail for a rape that he did not commit, Tish learns that she is pregnant. In flashbacks, Tish and Fonny's love blossoms, while in the present film, Tish's family does everything in their power to free Fonny from prison so he can be present at the birth of their baby.
By adapting Baldwin's strikingly evocative prose on the screen, Jenkins also draws on a number of other influences, including the remarkable black and white photographs of photographer Roy DeCarava. imagery of the powerful and colorful 1950s black life of Douglas Sirk melodramas. Jenkins interprets Baldwin's words in visual and cinematic terms, showing the bustling streets of the city, the cracked walls of the basement apartments, the outskirts of a prison visiting hall, the warm glow from a family reunion and the intimate comfort of dilapidated bars and diners, all backed by a rich result of Nicholas Britell.
In a recent profile of New York Times MagazineJenkins said, "My favorite thing is to sit at the window, the window of a sidewalk cafe." This quality of observation is in full force Beale StreetJenkins' film discovers and highlights so many small details of the black experience. Jenkins' film discovers the links that unite the whole in the face of often overwhelming social injustice. racism – the eternal importance of family, motherhood, love.
Microphone In November, Jenkins spoke by phone with him about his approach to accommodation. Beale Street, his loyalty to Baldwin, relying on a story centered on his female characters and creating an experience of "radical empathy". This interview has been modified and condensed for clarity.
Microphone: My first thought while watching Beale Street it's a fairly faithful adaptation, but not slavishly. You make changes, you even add a scene, and I had that feeling: "That's James Baldwin, I would not be afraid to do that."
Barry Jenkins: [Laughs] It was in fits and starts, I would say. I started by trying to make a very faithful adaptation. People ask me questions about the pressureMoonlight world, but it was not the pressure I felt. The pressure I felt was simply that Mr. Baldwin had not been adapted into English before and that, in some ways, it would be an introduction to his work for many people. I wanted to write his writing intact, so as to obtain the same imagination, the same spirit and the same vitality as in the text. This is why I felt in this respect a great sense of responsibility. And it can be difficult and difficult to create art when you have almost that latent responsibility that hangs over every decision you make.
It's hard to place the film in any genre of film, but he really feels indebted to the 1950s melodramas of directors like Douglas Sirk, in terms of style. Was pressing this style part of your approach for the adaptation to work on screen?
BJ: This is part of the first act approach, I would say. A film is a very malleable form, so I had the impression that the first act could have a certain tone, and that it patches so as to give an appearance to the second half which has nothing to do with the melodrama and the kind of aesthetic Sirk-ian. But the first act, absolutely. It's interesting, people keep mentioning the 1950s. I think part of that is stylistically, again, mentioning Douglas Sirk, which was certainly one of my references to the extent that this film is going to in the first act.
I also think that the way Tish's memories in the first act are framed has something so pure. It's like the first most iconic date in history, it's the first most tender badual experience ever, which does not remind you of America's 1960s anyway. , certainly not America in the 1970s. This is the period following the Second World War in the 50s, but this is the last time we can really think of a pure, pure Americana, unlike that she represents this young black couple. I think that's why people are talking about the idea of the 1950s from time to time, and I think it's something that should be adopted. I do not see it as derogatory at all.
Stylistically, one of the other things that really struck me, and you've done it before in your movies, is the straight-up shot in front of which the characters are looking at the camera. I think I noticed a dedication to the late director Jonathan Demme in the closing credits, which reminded him of his similar use of close-ups, which he called "subjective camera. "What attracts you in this technique?
BJ: By working with an adaptation, you are always trying to find a way to distinguish the new piece from the source material, and I think that reading literature on the page is quite different from experiencing it in the movies. You can actually look at Tish and Fonny in the eye. We especially thanked Mr. Demme, as well as Roy DeCarava and Gordon Parks. These are the three people who, in our opinion, have most influenced the aesthetics of this film. And you know, with Mr. Demme, he was such a vocal fan of me, and I actually could meet him and spend time with him, and it seemed appropriate to thank him in this room.
I often have the impression that because we look at a lot of different things, that we read less and that we look more, that the media has to be exploited almost more – aggressively, it is the word that does not fit, but that's all I can think of. now – in a more aggressive way. This is partly to allow and encourage the public to directly engage the characters on the screen. Mr. Demme did this with great success Thesilenceofthelambs and many of his other films, and we felt like Moonlight and in this film, there was a place for this almost radical empathy – you know, where the audience is directly involved, asked, encouraged to look at our characters in the face. When we do these blows, we never know where they will end up. They can very easily be removed from the narrative, they can very easily not be part of the story, but I think that in a way, it has elevated the immersive quality of the film.
You have a lot of characters in the movie, including the main character Tish, but you extend that kind of humanity to all the other characters. But there is an interesting difference in the way the female and male characters engage in the film. You have these women who are very powerful in many ways and who take care of their families and even the plot, then the men are almost absent but are still trying to express their free will and take charge of their situation.
BJ: It was something I knew in the source. I thought, especially after Moonlight, which is a male-dominated piece – Naomie Harris and Janelle Monáe are doing a great job in Moonlightbut this film is about men, it centers men. You're right, instead of moving away from [centering the women]I thought we could look into it and actually create that environment in which you really understand … You know, in the world in which I grew up especially, my personal life, most of the social "interactions" were run by and through the women of the family, and I think that Baldwin in this piece has created an environment in which the same thing is applicable. And I must say that it's great to create a scene where eight actors sit in a room and very quickly, the two men are forced to leave; they are told, "Go, go," and then, as often, women have the command to sort out, to make sense of, and to put order in the debates.
To be honest, it was a completely different muscle for me, and the way it worked for me as a director was that the film was told from the female point of view, but the book was not written by a woman, and I'm not a woman, and so on, some aspects of my ego just have to be checked. In this film, I learned the value of listening more than anything I've done in the past. There were places where my experience just could not compensate for what the actors were going through, so I had to ask them, "How are you feeling? What do you feel? How can we make this experience more organic? It was really nice to let Regina King, Teyonah Parris, KiKi Layne, Aunjanue Ellis and all those amazing women help me through the process.
It's also made me think of Fonny – and Stephan James is so great in the role – but his character, especially when he goes to jail … You talk about the women who sent the men out of the room – in Fonny's case, he was sent to jail. The emasculating nature of this really highlighted the boiling anger it creates. Show what the criminal justice system does to black people, and black men in particular.
BJ: Absolutely. I think Baldwin was a great thinker. He could be very precise and very sharp in his writings, but the ideas, the things he was struggling with were huge. And I think that's why, in the book and in the movie, this character, Daniel Carty, has just appeared. And, played by Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel is a satellite character, but then he appears and you see all these intellectual ideas about generational trauma, about mbad incarceration, about the prison-industry complex, the justice system , all these ideas merged. -and-man. And you really see all these things that [Fonny and Tish’s] families argue, discuss.
One of the most visceral experiences in the film is that where Aunjanue Ellis [who plays Fonny’s mother] out of the door and all she can say, it is: "This child, this child". Because in what world are we going to bring this child, with the father in prison for a crime that he has not committed, the elderly mother mother who does not have a diploma from College education? (Editor's note: Tish is 19 in the movie.)
And I have the feeling that Mr. Baldwin wrote about this treatise on how American society has weighed on the life and soul of blacks. And yes, I think that between Stephan's performance in the role of Fonny, whose vitality you feel, life fades over the movie, and then this conversation with Brian Tyree Henry, you see how this life is lived the force can be corrupted and destroyed by the conditions of the society.
Another scene that really struck me, perhaps in part because I'm Jewish, is the scene with Dave Franco, a Jew who rents an apartment in Tish and Fonny. You developed this from a book scene, adding this sentence from Franco to the question of why he treats Tish and Fonny so kindly, that he is the "son of his mother" . Baldwin had already written a lot about Jewish and black relations in America, and I guess I just wanted to know what you were trying to bring out in this scene – because, at least for me, there was something so beautiful in the fact that these characters are seeing each other.
BJ: For me, the character appears in the book and it's so strange because at this point, Baldwin just seems upset about everything, and then this character, Levy, introduces himself and he's just that symbol of decency, hope and light, at a time when Tish and Fonny need it the most, to be honest. It would always be part of the movie, but for whatever reason, something in me has somewhat rejected it. I just wanted it to be a more visceral connection between this character and Tish and Fonny.
Fonny asks, "Why are you treating two Negroes so nice?" In the book, there is so much about mothers and motherhood, and when I think about Moonlight and Beale Street as accompaniment pieces, these are the nature and diet exercises. If you take the character Regina King of Beale Street and makes her the mother Moonlightand if you took the character Naomie Harris in Moonlight and makes her the mother Beale StreetHow would this affect the lives of these children? So, with these characters, it's like, what's in Levy that makes him behave this way with these kids? It's like, oh, all right, they all come from a mother, and that's where the line comes from.
And I'll tell you man, it's one of those things where I like to react to the environment. We were looking for a very hard-to-find building in New York – a building that looked like what it was in the 70s, that Fonny could afford, and we finally found that building and the owner came in, and he was young A Jewish guy, wearing socks with his sandals, and I was thinking, "I'm going to model my character after that guy." Then I realized that I wanted a Jewish actor to play the role, and I did not realize that Dave Franco was Jewish. I was like, "You know what? That's it, it's bading shit, I want Dave Franco in our movie. This is the great comic who is funny, I want Dave Franco to play Levy. So I called him because I knew he and his brother, through the A24, were playing. The sinister artist at the time – and I called him to say, "Hey man, I have that little role, do you want to come and do it?" And he was in favor of the cause.
You know, it's interesting – so much has happened in recent months, the world is on fire, quite simply. I'm glad we've looked at this idea of the character and our main characters find common ground, because I think we need more of that in the world. I'm glad you talked about it. I did not talk enough about that part, because it's a really sweet thing to which, I think, we all felt very connected.
There is something, and I do not know if it's universal, whether it's among Jewish men or anything, but a sense of what our families have experienced and realize that we are all together. For me, it was a really interesting and beautiful idea, and I was really happy to see it materialize in this way in the film.
BJ: Thanks dude. It was an interesting choice for me because the purpose of this film was to be true to the text and, where we had gone beyond, we had not done so lightly. So it was one of the places where I felt as if we were keeping that and going to the end.
Does this go beyond what you think is special about the film, in terms of what the film can do for a story like this?
BJ: Absolutely. I think looking in the eyes, looking Fonny in the eyes, is an act so aesthetically aggressive in a way, that he can not help but take all the energy contained in the text and take it elsewhere. . At least, especially in a contemporary context, it can make empathy radically immediate. And I think that's the essence of what we do.
Do you see that as your mission?
BJ: If I had to choose to do it, yes. I think for the moment. At one point, I just want to make big robot movies, but we'll see when we get there.
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