“Moonlight”
Watching Barry Jenkins’s new
feature film Moonlight is like being
present at the very creation of the film – not just watching the scenes and
performances being captured on camera, but witnessing the conception of it
inside the director’s mind. He has filmed and presented it with such
spontaneity, and with so thorough a transference of deep subjectivity, that, as
François
Truffaut once wrote of the films of Renoir, I had to watch it in a theatre a
second time just to see if it would turn out the same way. Each shot we see is not
merely the canny illustration of burning experiences being depicted and fierce
emotions being expressed, but is itself the very expression of them, wrenched
from the director’s mind, and arising naturally and spontaneously out of the
situation of it being filmed and edited.
Take, for example, the scene
playing about halfway through the middle of the film’s three chapters, in which
the mother of the main character, Chiron, played by the remarkable British
actor Naomie Harris, anxiously greets her son when he gets home one afternoon,
and asks him for money (the implication is clear that it’s for more drugs, to
feed her addiction). Jenkins has made clear in a large number of interviews and
press statements that Harris’s character, Paula, as written by him and his
co-writer Tarell Alvin McCraney and as filmed by him, is based in large part on
his own mother. Her scenes in the film play with an especial and tremulous
immediacy, and this particular one stands out for a peculiar visual invention
as well – Jenkins, in the moment of filming the actor’s performance, got her to
play it looking straight into the lens, and shot it at the higher rate of 48
frames per second. (Almost all video you see is shot at 24 frames a second; the
heightened speed is a new industrial technological advance, notably used to
shoot Peter Jackson’s recent Hobbit
trilogy.) The result has the effect of an unnerving and rare proximity to the
figure onscreen, intensifying her essence while simultaneously rendering it
more opaque. Indeed, throughout the film, Harris’s performance is perhaps the
most intricate (while Janelle Monáe takes the crown for distinctiveness,
Trevante Rhodes for tender sensitivity, and Mahershala Ali for grandeur).