Several months on from that chaotic moment at the Oscar podium, the topsy-turvy best picture triumph of Moonlight (Altitude, 15) seems no less astonishing in retrospect. In a sense, Barry Jenkins’s shimmering, trisected portrait of a young African American man’s developing sexuality had to win in unprecedented circumstances, because nothing like it had ever scaled that summit of mainstream acclaim. Still, we should resist the urge to turn this lovely, supple, tactile film into some kind of all-purpose landmark. The beauty of this character study lies in intimate particularities: those of its internally riven, love-starved protagonist, Chiron, certainly, but also those of Jenkins’s own tender, sensual gaze, coloured by such plainly cherished influences as Wong Kar-wai and Claire Denis.
Many hailed the film’s vivid evocation of the challenges of growing up black, gay and poor in Miami as broadly universal, but I think such extrapolation does Moonlight a disservice. Yes, it exquisitely invites empathy, but the specificity of the experience under scrutiny is key – it’s a film about the difficulties of being oneself under a stifling set of social conditions many of us can scarcely imagine. We are not all Chiron, but Jenkins’s great, humane achievement is to make us all sensitive to his mostly unspoken currents of pain and desire, as articulated through the subtlest details of music, light and body language. At first blush, I wondered if the film had been a fraction over-lyricised; its third, least visceral and most romantic act still moves me a little less than the first two. But Moonlight grows and glows on repeat viewings, its impulses toward lust and caution cannily mirroring those of the black‑and-blue heart at its centre.
To move from Moonlight to The Lego Batman Movie (Warner, U) isn’t exactly a sublime-to-ridiculous transition, given that Chris McKay’s lunatic, plastic-built Dark Knight parody aspires to a demented sublimity of its own. Bounding and blaring and splattering hit-and-miss-and-hit-again gags at several miles a minute, this breathless dodgem ride gets a good three-quarters of the way there, curbed only by its inevitable inability to match the broader satirical remit and stylistic surprise factor of 2014’s ingenious The Lego Movie. That still makes it the most generously entertaining superhero film in eons, with Will Arnett’s pumice-throated Bruce Wayne giving the caped avenger the ruthless ribbing he’s needed since Christopher Nolan doured him up.
I wouldn’t call Koji Fukada’s Harmonium (Eureka, 12A) dour, but it’s impressively, even mesmerisingly severe: a family melodrama in which the smallest actions are weighted with stern consequence. The set-up may seem standard-issue – a quiet-living family man offers shelter to a troubled old friend, with domestically unharmonious consequences – but Fukada charts the household’s growing disorder with a taut, constricting sense of dread and the faintest trickle of everyday humour. The spare, humanist influence of Ozu is plain to see here, but Fukada’s tone is all his own, simultaneously shot through with violence and compassion.
On the classic cinema front, it’s a good week for fans – or perhaps a good week to become a fan – of Luis Buñuel. Two of the late Spanish iconoclast’s most rigorous 1960s provocations are newly available to stream on mubi.com: The Exterminating Angel, a wicked, serpentine allegory of bourgeois savagery, and Viridiana, a stark, salted-wound fable of holy innocence under attack that might be his most emotionally shattering film. On DVD, meanwhile, comes the reissue of an earlier, less celebrated curiosity: Death in the Garden (Eureka, 15), in which a ragtag assemblage of political refugees goes rogue in the South American jungle, increasingly subject to Buñuel’s most saturated surrealist instincts. It’s minor relative to Mubi’s selections, but they’d make for a wild, monochrome-to-Technicolor triple bill.
