Moonlight
"In moonlight, black boys look blue."
The narrative resonates these words till the final frame, and Mahershala Ali's clinical performance makes these words all the more important. He won the Academy Award for the Best Actor (Male) for a performance which has a screen presence of about 18 minutes. I can watch this film again and again for this performance, and also for the brilliant Naomie Harris. The crises of the respective characters are put up on screen with an unprecedented finesse. As far as Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes are concerned, Chiron (Black) is a character who is written with a lot of silent expressive intuitions, and all of the actors did justice to the same. This is not the first film which dealt with the idea of portraying various stages in the life of a common man, where different actors portray the same person, albeit in various ages. But, this film is special for the way it writes the temporal development of the character of Chiron. The final half hour of the film which explores the depth of Chiron and Kevin's relationship is one of the the best written, performed and crafted concluding segments I came across in recent times.
I learnt that all of the actors portraying each stage of the lives of Chiron and Kevin never met with each other or watched each other's performances while shooting for the film. Barry Jenkins made sure that the actors create and portray the respective character stages according to their own individual perceptions. This seemed to be a very interesting way of creating a character on screen.
This film deserves all the recognitions of the world.
Currently, it's streaming on Amazon Prime Video in India. If you have not yet watched it yet, I would strongly recommend this.
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