If Beale Street Could Talk – Thame Cinema 4 All

WHEN? Saturday, June 1, 2019 – WHAT TIME? 8 pm – WHERE? Thame Players Theatre, Nelson Street, Thame. Film details: USA 2018, 119 minutes, 15 certificate. Directed by Barry Jenkins, Starring KiKi Layne, Stephan James, Regina King, Colman Domingo, Teyonah Parris, Michael Beach.

Barry Jenkins follows his Oscar winner, Moonlight, with this sensual and tender love story, an adaptation of a novel of the same name by James Baldwin. Tish and Vonny have always known each other, but as they have grown up they fall in love. It is 1970s Harlem. Tish has just found out that she is pregnant. The two dream about making a life for themselves, with Vonny an aspiring sculptor.

They struggle to find a place to rent in a city where landlords are reluctant to take on African-American tenants. But just as life seems to be taking shape, Vonny is arrested for a crime that he didn’t commit, on the basis of unreliable testimony from a questionable – but equally marginalised – victim, set up by a racist police officer with a grudge against Vonny. Tish and the extended family of their local community must muster an appeal to get Vonny out of prison in time for the baby’s arrival. But this is a system that makes it easy to put black men in prison but very difficult to get them out, taking them off the streets and then tying them up in the interminable bureaucracies of a judicial system that has no interest in justice.

Baldwin’s novel is an examination of the enduring legacies of history in the experience of contemporary black Americans, and institutional collusion in perpetuating enslavement. But Jenkins’ film is, above all, about love. It is a tender, swooning, and intimate portrait of young love, its redemptive potential and its hopeful resilience. Layne and James are utterly captivating in the lead roles, with Oscar-winning support from a cast including Regina King as Tish’s mother, Sharon, and Teyonnah Parris as her feisty older sister, Ernestine. Gorgeous and heart-breaking. View the TRAILER HERE.