If Beale Street Could Talk, Jenkins’s follow-up to Moonlight (2016), has as its engine a suspense plot of sorts, taken from the 1974 source novel by James Baldwin: the struggle to exonerate jailed Fonny Hunt ( Stephan James) from a rape charge ginned up by a racist cop and a complicit DA’s office. In the use of long lenses and shallow depth of field, in the precision of gesture and the hushed attention to the minutiae of domestic ritual, the moment resembles nothing so much as the work of one of Jenkins’s avowed models, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and establishes the tempo for the movie to come. Early on in Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk, there’s a gathering in the Harlem home of the Rivers family that proceeds with an almost hypnotic ceremoniousness, as a bottle of Hennessy is handed down from a high kitchen cabinet to be poured in preparation for the delivery of big news.
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