"Moonlight" | A film that breaks rules
Watching Moonlight is akin to getting into the skin of these unfathomably unhappy people. The film has no formal structure. It cuts sharply into slices from the protagonist’s life and leaves the shards and splinters strewn across the narration for us to stumble and bleed over. Not that anyone cares.
Moonlight is not an easy film to watch. It doesn’t sanitize the protagonist’s emotional trauma the way the other Oscar-nominated film Lion does. Rather, it opens up wounds that never heal, tells us that the hurt heart never recovers. And that pain, isolation and the pain of isolation are what we must learn to live with.
This is the first film featuring a gay protagonist which doesn’t make a virtue of his emotional softness. Little Chiron (Alex Hibbert) living in a tough Miami neighbourhood where drugs and prostitution are a way of life, is constantly bullied for not being able to do ‘man’ things properly, like playing football and talking dirty about girls. Chiron’s uncertainties are starkly mapped in little Hibbert’s face. His tormented eyes will haunt you for a very long time.”How will I know,” as a child, he asks about his own sexuality.
Those tormented haunted eyes follow Chiron’s character through two other segments showing Chiron as a teenager when Ashton Sanders takes over the role as though he owns it. Then finally, it is Trevante Rhodes as the adult Chiron, all muscled up to fortify himself from the bullies the Man and Destiny hurl his way. I remember while filming Boyhood, director Richard Linklater had waited for the same actor to grow up to film the later parts of the character’s life. Moonlight cannot afford that luxury. It’s a film in a hurry. The narrative is fidgety, restless, nervous, almost impatient to the point of self-ruination. No formal narrative convention is followed. We see chapters from Chiron’s life unfold with unostentatious casualness. The world Chiron inhabits is dark and desperate but never gloomy. Though violent, Chiron’s environment is never shown as lethal. Characters carry guns, but no one shoots. Wisely, director Barry Jenkins focuses on the inevitability of heartbreak in a world steeped in anxiety.
The narrative seems strangely detached and disengaged, as though it couldn’t care less whether we the audience give the characters the attention that they should. It is in the way the characters play out their denuded, disengaged drama that the core of the film’s humanism emerges. Everyone will walk away from Moonlight with favourite moments.
This is a film that doesn’t believe in the rules. It breaks them with no arrogance or pleasure. Just a feeling of deep regret and distant hope.
