IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK

James Baldwin was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He was an African-American and he was gay and he allowed both these intrinsic elements to elucidate his writing and to get inside the mind and under the skin of his characters. If you read Baldwin you knew exactly where he was coming from; he put you on the page the way great writers should. Amazingly, he has always been ignored by the cinema perhaps because until now few film-makers felt they were up to the task of conveying on screen what Baldwin conveyed in print. Until now; now we have the remarkably gifted Barry Jenkins, a film-maker with many of the gifts of Baldwin. His first film, "Moonlight", though not adapted from Baldwin, dealt with both the African-American and the homosexual experience as it traced the story of a young African-American through three stages of his life. It was a deserving, if surprising, winner of the Oscar for Best Picture.

Now Jenkins has turned directly to Baldwin and applied his poetry to Baldwin's love story "If Beale Street Could Talk" in which a young girl struggles to prove the innocence of her boyfriend on a trumped-up rape charge. It could have been an angry film and Baldwin knew what it was like to be angry but in place of anger Jenkins fills his film with love and honesty in place of sentimentality. The affection Jenkins feels for these characters is conveyed in images of real beauty and in performances of extraordinary clarity.


As the young lovers, KiKi Layne and Stephan James are superb but then every performance is perfectly balanced with Regina King perhaps the stand-out as the girl's mother. This is a great film and it should finally establish Jenkins as one of the finest film-makers working anywhere in the world today. That it failed to pick up a nomination for the Best Picture Oscar is shameful, particularly when you look at some of the films that did make the list. Essential viewing.