Barry Jenkins's coming-of-age drama is a landmark for both African-American and LGBTQ+ cinema.
In film, there’s a term called “Face of God moments,” that refers to those remarkable scenes when some moment of transcendent love and grace appears on screen, as if the audience or characters or both are staring into the face of God.
Barry Jenkins’s 2016 masterpiece,
Moonlight, a coming-of-age tale about a young Black man’s childhood and adolescence as he struggles with his identity and sexuality, is full of these moments.
Moonlight is uniquely powerful as a whole, but specifically the scene with Juan teaching Little to swim in the ocean is one of the most sublime Face of God moments I’ve ever witnessed. Backed by
Nicholas Britell’s soul-stirring musical score, Jenkins’s camera hides unseen in the ocean swells like an invisible spirit, giving us this intimate look at the radiant, fatherly love Juan has developed for the young, troubled, outcast of a child who’s attached himself to Juan. And as the child grows from Little, to Chiron, to Black, it’s the ocean that he’ll find himself returning to as he discovers himself, as it’s the ocean itself from which his own feelings of self-worth seem to have sprung, with Juan gently cradling him, affectionately telling him he’s “in the middle of the world.” After patiently getting Little comfortable to that all-encompassing blue - the womb of the world - and teaching him the fundamentals, when Little finally summons up the courage to swim unassisted, the unrestrained pride and bliss and love in Juan’s laugh seems to tear back the curtain of the art form itself, giving us a glimpse of these unexplainable but recognizable divine truths about life - the type of truths that talented artists cause to bleed out of fiction.
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