Moonlight is one of those films that seems to have been made in secret. Directed by Barry Jenkins in 2016 and based on the novel by Tarell Alvin McCraney. The film is divided into three parts: the childhood, adolescence, and adulthood of Chiron. A Black boy growing up in a deprived suburb of Miami.
There are no shootouts or epic soundtracks. Instead, there is a boy who barely speaks and learns to swim with the help of a drug dealer (with a fatherly heart). Who at one point reveals to him that he is Cuban by birth.
Also this drug dealer is named Juan, played by Mahershala Ali, and is the only tenderness Chiron receives in his early years. His mother, Paula, is a crack addict who demands money from him and throws him out of the house when he becomes a nuisance. Juan teaches him what the word “faggot” means and tells him not to let anyone label him.
But Juan also sells the drugs his mother uses. When Chiron discovers this, he abandons him. Carlos Boyero wrote in El País that Jenkins delves into a little-explored world. That of a withdrawn child who, instead of expressing himself with his mouth, does so with his eyes.
In adolescence, Chiron remains thin, shy, quiet, and easy prey for bullies. His only friend is Kevin, a determined boy who one night, on the beach where Juan taught him to swim, kisses him and they become intimate. This constitutes the film’s only explicit sex scene and, arguably, the most important.
Also the following morning, Kevin beats Chiron under pressure from the gang, and Chiron, bleeding on the ground, refuses to tell on him. But the next day, he enters the classroom and breaks a chair over his bully’s back. It is his first act of explicit violence and also his sentence to a juvenile detention center.
Ten years later, Chiron is a man. He calls himself Black, has swollen arms, gold-plated teeth, and sells drugs like the late Juan. He receives a call from Kevin, now a cook at a Miami restaurant and on parole.
The film, brilliantly, doesn’t judge Chiron for becoming what he hated. It observes him with the same benevolence with which it observed his childhood and adolescence. In their final encounter, the two men sit in the kitchen of the now-closed restaurant. Kevin prepares a special dish for him, and Chiron, who doesn’t drink alcohol. Admits that he hasn’t been with anyone since that night on the beach…
With Moonlight, the film won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2017. It portrays a Black, gay man who doesn’t die in the end. Who doesn’t commit suicide, who doesn’t go to a meeting to say goodbye.
Chiron survives, and more than just living, he becomes what he detested. Yet he still receives Kevin’s affection on a narrow sofa. While the screen blends him with the image of the boy he once was, his back to the sea, looking at the viewer as if asking to remember, and to understand.
A work by: Liam Bornot, a journalism student
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