and her colleague Nick talked about the movie "Moonlight" (2016) by African American director Barry Jenkins (Barry Jenkins). He said that as a gay man, he experienced the pain of loneliness and discrimination when he grew up... … "Moonlight" is about the trauma experienced by the black boy Chiron growing up in an impoverished community in Miami. However, sometimes the "identity politics" in American public opinion emphasizes the unity of identity too much. In fact, everyone is the overlap of multiple identities. Here, it is class, race, and sexual orientation: youngsters from poor communities of African descent gradually become lonely. Explore your own sexual orientation. However, the sincerity and force of the film's sound and picture, emotional expression, and the depth of its intervention in reality are far beyond what these label descriptions can summarize.
Before I went to watch "Moonlight", I heard it was praised so much. I wonder if it was due to people's backlash against the overall "whiteness" of last year's Oscar winners, and out of care and love for minority films... Anticipation and speculation, the screenwriter, director and performance are relatively subtle, and there is no lack of strength and intervention in the cruel reality of the poor African community: Chiron comes from a single-parent family, his father has never appeared, and his mother takes drugs; he is soft, lonely, and demeanor. Dressed differently and bullied by boys of the same age. This situation continued until high school. The reality of the United States outside of the movie is also true. Different African men suffer more violence in this community-they kill each other, and many young men have died as a result of violence. Chiron was lucky again. An adult man who resembled his father's image, Juan, protected him, taught him to swim in the sea (like a baptism), and took him in when he was desperate for his mother. However, this model of life is a drug dealer, and when he reprimanded Chiron's mother for taking drugs, he was too speechless to refute.
Through the subjective lens and soundscape, the keen sensory experience presented in the film is all through Chiron's subjective observation and experience. As a result, the audience was disturbed by his anxiety, feared by his fear, and lonely by his loneliness. The strong sense of substitution makes the audience care about the painful spiritual journey of the characters. It is also because these are the childhood experiences of the original play author Tarell Alvin McCraney (his stage script was originally called "The Black Boy in the Moonlight Looks Blue") and the director's childhood experience. They grew up in a single-parent family of the same African-American poor community in Miami in the 1980s, attended the same elementary school, and their mothers both had cocaine addiction (and were HIV carriers), and both had experience of being bullied in school. Sometimes there is no food at home, or lack of water and electricity. In his childhood, McCraney was indeed protected by a drug dealer and taught to swim. Chiron's story is almost a private memory of their autobiography. The African-American singer-actor Janelle Monáe, who plays Juan’s girlfriend Tereza, shed tears during the filming, because these characters are relatives and friends in her hometown of Kansas City. .
The screenwriter also called these memories "good nightmares", because these childhood experiences are filtered by the memories and are Miami Beach, palm trees and the high sky, bright and colorful. Director Jenkins tried to simulate the background and tone of Fujifilm, Ikefa and Kodak film in three narrative images of childhood, youth and adulthood. The beautiful scenery makes the reality more cruel. The photography also focuses on the skin texture of the characters in sunlight and sweat, dark and shiny, full, and it seems to be saturated with emotions. At the beginning of the film, there is a long shot of one hundred and sixty degrees for several weeks, showing space and character scheduling, a slight sense of dizziness, and some Wong Kar-wai/Du Kefeng style.
Inspired by the three-stage narrative structure of "Moonlight", Jenkins said that it came from Hou Xiaoxian's film "The Best Time" (2005), especially a game in the billiard room-he took a year off when he was studying filmmaking at Florida State University. Expo film magazines and world films, especially Asian films. In addition to Hou Xiaoxian, traces of Wong Kar-wai's "Happy Together" and "Blueberry Night" can also be easily seen in "Moonlight". The Spanish song "Cucurrucucú Paloma" used here once appeared in "Happy Together"; years later, Chiron and Kevin reunited in a late-night restaurant. Kevin carefully cooked a dish for his old friend, like Zhang Zhen in "Happy Together" The character played by Tony Leung, or the late night reunion of the two in the cafe in "Blueberry". The twinkling eyes and smiles, the subtle ambiguity of wanting to talk, between the confidant and the lover, regardless of the same sex, commemorate the moment of ecstasy in adolescence due to extreme loneliness and intimacy. The reunion of old friends is also accompanied by the classic "Hello Stranger" by the black female singer Barbara Lewis in the 1960s-Jenkins played this song on the shooting site to create an atmosphere.
The surprise of "Moonlight" also lies in the appearance of an elegant tranquility that is completely different from the rough and vigorous temperament of previous African-themed films. Adult Chiron's super masculine appearance conceals insecurities, and his internalized emotions are surging under the calm surface. Does suffering have to use documentary naturalism to get closer to reality? Is the aesthetic audiovisual style a bourgeois sentiment and a departure from the suffering of reality? These are all questions that can be considered and discussed. Director Jenkins is also soberly aware that in the capitalist system, film is a privileged industry and art form, which is essentially far away from people in poor communities, because even independent films require a lot of investment, and "middle-class white men" are more accessible. resource. Movies that show the bottom of the African-American community in Miami will also be filmed and distributed by white New York investors. According to my observations, most of the audiences who go to art theaters to watch this film are also middle-class white middle-aged and elderly audiences.
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