"If Beale Street could speak," Barry Jenkins's masterly novel

James Baldwin's 1974 novel "If Beale Street Could Talk" portrays the experiences of a pregnant black teenager in Harlem with a cinematic quality that reads almost like a screenplay. It is not surprising that screenwriter and director Barry Jenkins draws inspiration from the source, transforming Baldwin's evocative vision of young lovers struggling with race and class into a masterful poetic romance. Yet Jenkins' sequel to "Moonlight" also maintains its deep, expressionist aesthetic, with its lush colors and captivating faces that speak volumes about the subject, giving rise to a fascinating hybrid experience – a seminalist voice of the present in an explosion of creative passion.

While "Moonlight" engaged in the inner struggles of a young man in Miami at a vaguely defined time, "Beale Street" is firmly anchored in a time and place: Harlem, where Tish (Kiki Layne) is struggling with the news of the boyfriend of his boyfriend Fonny (Stephan James), aged 22, while he is behind bars. Accused of rape, this evidence suggests that he could not have committed, Fonny begins "Beale Street" as the quintessence of all that holds Tish of the life she wants for herself. He is a victim of the system that keeps them all, Fonny, Fish and their respective families, to a level of emotional satisfaction that they pursue in all scenes.

As in the novel, Tish tells the story on two simultaneous timelines, recalling his first dating with Fonny and the challenges surrounding his incarceration at the same time. Jenkins weaves them with remarkable fluidity, with its familiar visual finesse bringing a livelier update to the sophisticated "Moonlight" tapestry. This time, the outline of the dark drama is overflowing with cracks.

The filmmaker James Laxton's vibrant color palette merges with Nicholas Britell's musical compositions as the film combines his narrative with small moments: When Tish tells his mother about his mother Sharon (Regina King), Jenkins only includes The Face from Layne expressing everything about the character's fears for the future. Similarly, when Sharon tells her husband, Joseph (Colman Domingo) and her older sister Ernestine (Teyronah Parris), their instant celebratory tone brings a new dose of lightness to Jenkins' growing filmography. unity becomes a centerpiece of history.

Fonny's family does not take the news as well. Still under the shock of their son's uncertain fate, his mother (Aunjanue Ellis) breaks up, prompting her husband (Michael Beach) to launch a sharp rebuke. As the two homes engage in a tense war of words, Jenkins' script combines sassiness and rage, landing in a high tone between desperation and unexpected lightness. The world of Tish exists at this surprising intersection.

With more vitality and humor than "Moonlight," Jenkins' confidence in the original text opens the filmmaker's style, but it also turns matter into a broader meditation on Baldwin's broader concerns. The author's dynamic characterizations of dark life were based on a distinctive language and precise imagery that defined his acute critical voice and reverberated in Jenkins drama. More than once, he infuses Baldwin's fixations into the story with black-and-white photos of African-American struggles that create an astonishing historical backdrop for Tish's intimate challenges. In an instant, Jenkins cites the famous cover photo of Gordon Parks' Life magazine, "Ellen Crying," an image with the ramifications of an impoverished black life struggling with stability. It's "Beale Street" in a nutshell.

For the most part, Jenkins sticks to Tish's personal observations about his relationship with Fonny, with romantic excerpts that invite Wong Kar Wai to make comparisons. However, while Hong Kong's auteur films focus on similar ineffable desires, Jenkins fuses his most powerful images with a voice-over that puts them in context. Tish observes, "He was the most beautiful person I saw in my life" and their corresponding expressions – Jenkins uses the subtle variations of facial muscles as narrative devices – a visible truth.

The filmmaker's ambition continues to expand as the world of Tish opens up: when she describes her ungrateful work as a perfume sampler in a radiant white mall, his fake smile fills the frame. Loses his virginity to Fonny in his apartment, Jenkins cuts to an album that ends at the end of a jazz song. These indelible rhythms define the progressive rhythm of the film while it is articulated from moment to moment.

There is a real plot at the center of this collage, surrounding the constant attempts of both families to fight for Fonny's exoneration. This battle ends with a dramatic trip to Puerto Rico, where Tish's mother goes in search of the rape victim in a risky attempt to save Fonny from persecution. The sequence has the super tension of the gloomy black, but King adds a credible degree of suspense by giving Sharon the conviction that she can succeed at any cost. The results at once fascinating and loaded with sadness. King has every second on the screen, while Sharon struggles to contain his rage with hesitant confidence.

However, Jenkins seems the least comfortable with these conventional narrative beats. His two previous feature films, the talkative novel "Medicine for Melancholy" and "Moonlight", have avoided a more traditional plot development. "If Beale Street Could Talk" is halfway down with less complicated developments and tight roles for supporting characters (including a benevolent waiter played by Diego Luna and a Jewish real estate agent played by Dave Franco), mesmerizing sighting . When Brian Tyree Henry, Fonny's fiance, presents himself as a long-time friend, the camera lands on his face as he remembers the jail time and persecution of racist policemen. for a moment, the whole movie slips into the confines of her grief. "Beale Street" has more to say about collective emotional barriers than anything else. A recurring motif is that Layne and James look at each other through the prison window and that the lyrical ramifications of this constant boundary – an institutional barrier beyond anything they can control – are deep.

Those who are familiar with the source material will be surprised to find that the film reaches a new conclusion, including a leap of time that provides more finality to the ultimate fate of these characters. It's a surprising choice that takes history in a whole new direction as it leaves the next chapter in the story of Fonny and Tish unclear. In the end, the film suggests that the couple is destined to continue to chase an ideal just beyond their reach, but that it's worth pursuing all the same.

Grade: A-

"If Beale Street Could Talk" was premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018. Annapurna Pictures is theatrically released on November 30, 2018.

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