There’s an open-endedness with which Moonlight prods masculinity that trails from the start to its warm final embrace at the end. And later, with the celestial, blue aura acting as a protecting agent from awaiting violence, romantically uniting teenaged Kevin and Chiron within its freeing glow.
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That elusive sense of fulfillment is at the core of two of Moonlight ’s most memorable scenes: In a childhood memory, as Juan teaches a child Chiron how to swim, the camera temporarily submerges as we watch the makeshift father-and son-duo, renewed and gleaming within the vastness. In Moonlight, Chiron’s biggest wish is to be recognized–as a person and nothing else. “You don’t even know me,” he heaves, breaking into sobs. A faculty member says “if he were a man,” he’d point out the kids who assaulted him. And then there’s the bruised and lacerated Chiron sitting in a school office in the aftermath. Kevin is the closest thing Chiron has to a companion, but he betrays and assaults him when his manhood is questioned. When he storms a during the dinner scene after realizing this, Juan is left to reconcile with his sins through his tears. But Chiron eventually realizes this is a drug dealer who’s destroying his home. Juan is genuinely a decent dude who develops loving paternal relationship. While the film’s school bully Jenkins (Patrick Decile) is indefensible, he’s one-dimensional enough to only serve as a stand-in for the ugliness of masculinity. All of this is made bare to the audience, and makes it all the more deflating to watch Chiron become a drug dealer whose gold fronts, chains, and durag clearly serve as an armor.Īnd outward posturing rarely heals inward corrosion. It’s a tightrope walk between dream and reality: memories from his childhood manifest to give context for his introversion. The images of the children maliciously ignoring or chasing after Chiron at the film’s start are partially presented out of focus and off-frame. (In fact, one character jokes that he barely speaks more than three words at a time.) But that pain is viscerally present in his expression and that of those who surround him in longing stares and the resolute loneliness that silently erodes so many black men. Chiron is never given a soapbox from which to deliver some scene -stealing soliloquy about his pain.
This internal and interpersonal struggle is deftly expressed throughout the film. Moonlight examines Chiron’s fight to simply become himself. The film reveals that identity evolves with the way we interact with society, and that we will be forced to tangle with the perception of those terms– “queerness,” “race”– taking on their narratives, their mores, and their burdens. What makes this film a frontrunner for film of the year is its central the process of establishing identity–that queerness and race are not biological traits, but rather sociological ideas. But these cycles are mentioned in passing as checkpoints in a brutal reality.
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Moonlight is a film conscious of how failing institutions destroy the black community: Institutionalized black men replace drug dealers, and a surrogate father (Juan, played compassionately by Mahershala Ali) can only do so much good if he’s also making a living by selling crack to a mother, a jarring realization Chiron makes in one heartbreaking scene. Blue is both Chiron’s imprisonment and his salvation. It’s the color scheme of his broken home. It’s the color of the moonlight that illuminates his dreams. It paints the school walls where Chiron is bullied within. His crack-addicted, self-hating mother (Naomie Harris) is bathed red during as she spews verbal abuse, and industrial orange streetlights prickle the night sky as Chiron kisses his boyhood friend Kevin (Jaden Pine to Jharrel Jerome to The Knick ’s André Holland) on the beach.īut director Barry Jenkins’ genius return to cinema, which is based off Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, seems to put an extra weight on shades of blue.
Moonlight, which follows an impoverished black person named Chiron from boyhood through adulthood (played by Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, Trevante Rhodes) as he struggles with his queerness and masculinity, makes use of saturated colors. Discovery begets this sense of imprisonment. These are images both of freedom and overwhelming vastness-a reminder of our decaying bodies’ limitations.
It calls to mind the omnipresence of the skies and the ocean’s unfathomable expanse. There’s a cruel dichotomy signified by the color blue.
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