[9.4/10] Nobody blends love and tragedy like Barry Jenkins. *If Beale Street Could Talk* is, like *Moonlight* before it, a profound story of two people who very much belong together, but who broken systems rip apart. It is both heartening and heart-breaking, a movie that will make you want to celebrate the love of two people deeply devoted to one another, and the family that goes to great lengths to protect it, but also lament the larger forces and tragedies that threaten the sanctity of such a beautiful thing at every turn.

*If Beale Street Could Talk* is divided into before and after. There is the time prior to Fonny’s incarceration for a crime he didn’t commit, a blissful age where love blossoms between two people who know each other so well that they cease to become separate individuals and start to become one unified whole. And there is the time after he is laid low by a corruptible institution and bad actors, where those with less power and resources must scramble, futily, to set him free.

The film lives in the contrast between those two eras of this couple’s lives. The force of Jenkins’ production emerges in the juxtaposition. *Beale Street* is not a linear movie. Instead, it opens with two young, beautiful people expressing their love and devotion to one another in gorgeous, eye-popping color. It follows that moment of mutual commitment with a dingy, washed out prison visitation room, where the same two lovers have to express their affections through glass. So goes the movie, where scenes and sequences of romantic triumph are interspersed with the bitter and harsh realities of what mass incarceration and an overburdened justice system imposes on decent folk who simply long to be together.

What comes through in these moments is not just the unfathomable distance between one moment in time and another. It is the pure humanity on display in so many sequences here. The genius of Jenkins and his team is that they know how to expertly blend the raw authenticity and recognizable nature of human interaction, with the stylized filmmaking that helps to convey the ineffable emotions behind those interactions.

To the point, the cadence of *Beale Street* is an alternating rhythm of extended conversations between confidante -- delivering unwaveringly with a naturalism and conviction that sits the audience down next to the players -- punctuated with sumptuous montages and cinematographic flourishes, channeling the almost holy sentiments and connections that fuel them. In places, some of the dialogue feels stagey, as though with the right adaptation, this could be a stunning play. But Jenkins & Co. commit to the cinematic form, both in how they shoot those extended, intimate family moments, and in how they connect them via impressionistic celebrations of joy and solace which will, sadly, be stifled down the line.

Make no mistake, *Beale Street* is utterly gorgeous to look at. With his depiction of New York City in the 1970s, Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton call to mind the work of luminaries like Scorsese and Coppola. There’s a lushness to so many of the more romantic or affectionate stretches of the film, done up in bright primary blues and yellows and greens. But their team cuts that sterling image of love with literally darker moments, the major figures shrouded in shadows, but lit well enough to see the contrast in their faces, forcing the audience to take in every expression. Smoke-filled spaces, where the light trickles in, trace the blend of light and dark that invigorates the film.

It’s the mix of heaven and hell that crosses one family’s joyous celebration of their daughter announcing her pregnancy with another’s shame and internal strife over the realization that their son is the father. It is the joyous reunion between two old friends who have the ease of manner and shorthand that evinces a longstanding bond, cut with a recollection of the brutality of prison that has clearly shaken one of those two men to his core. It is a mother’s courageous, desperate plea on behalf of her child, to free the father of her grandson, contrasted with a young woman utterly devastated by her rape and unwilling or unable to reprocess it.

All of these interludes are scored with a combination of soothing violins that set the tone for the romance of Tish and Fonny and their affecting intimacy, along with a lyrical jazz patter that matches that smooth sonic silk with a more chaotic energy. In moments when the film focuses on Fonny’s hands, or on Tish’s nigh-angelic bearing, or on so many characters looking directly at the camera, the music helps tell the story without words.

*Beale Street* contains ample voiceover, communicating Tish’s inner thoughts as the movie jumps back and forth in time. Her words are the connective tissue between those two era, the prior hopeful interludes where friendship blossoms into romance blossoms into family, and the latter patches of desperation, made manifest through a system both malevolent and oblivious that tears it to shreds despite so many good works to stave it off.

That’s what stamps *If Beale Street Could Talk* is so remarkable. It is both of these things at once. Edited to that effect, it could just be a love story, the tale of an astounding bond between two people that is tested in ways unimaginable to many but a constant spectre to so many more, that persists through those hardships. But separate from that, it could also be chopped up into a bitter story of potential unjustly squanched, young lovers robbed of their transcendent connection, thanks to prejudice and indifferent institutions that drain those unfortunate enough to be caught up in its gears of money and patience and life.

Jenkins marries these two irreconcilable elements of the story of Tish and Fonny. No other filmmaker could make you so profoundly feel the depth and lived-in love between these two achingly real human beings. And no other filmmaker could make you so harshly confront the tragedies imposed on them by forces beyond their control, forces which can stifle their love, hinder it, but never extinguish it.