LOVE, BROOKLYN** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Preview

LOVE, BROOKLYN is a gentle earnest romantic dramedy with a side order of social commentary about gentrification. The positives: the film contains three great central performances, and some lovely lensing of a pandemic-emptied Brooklyn from DP Martim Vian. The negatives: the film moves way too slowly, and its insights are way too trite, for it to be either memorable or engaging.  

LOVE, BROOKLYN is the debut feature from director Rachael Holder and screenwriter Paul Zimmerman, and maybe that shows in its pacing. Or maybe it was a choice. But my word, for a 97 minute film I really was looking at my watch and wondering why we had not progressed. 

The film stars Andre Holland (MOONLIGHT) as Roger - a likeable thirtysomethibng journo who spends his time cycling around his beloved Brooklyn lamenting its evolution and wrestling with whether he is still in love with his ex- or ready to take on a deeper commitment with the single mum he had a one night stand with.  The ex is played by Nicole Beharie, currently on screen in Apple TV's The Morning Show.  She is fantastic as art gallerist Casey - all wit and vitality and zip.  Holland and Beharie have such on-screen chemistry we wonder why they broke up in the first place. And then we have DeWanda Wise as the more mature, centred and calm single mother Nicole, and I loved the scenes with her precocious young daughter Ally.  Nicole gently coaxes Roger into having more interaction with Ally and gives him the confidence to see a future together.  All three are good earnest people trying to live a good life. There's no actual dramatic tension.  There is, however,  some lovely gentle comedy provided by The Daily Show's Roy Wood Jr., as Alan, Roger's best friend.

There's some trite stuff at the end tying in the need to move forward, both in relationships to people and our urban homes.  The film washed over me like a warm breeze. Inconsequential and forgettable but not entirely unpleasant. 

LOVE, BROOKLYN has a running time of 97 minutes. It was released in the USA in September.

MOONLIGHT

In over a decade of watching over 200 movies a year, and trying to seek out independent movies, I've never seen a film about gay black men.  That's really quite something when you think about it.  And so it's deeply refreshing and heartening to see MOONLIGHT capture critical praise.  That said, while I found much to admire in its intent and some of its performances, it was a less moving and impressive watch than I had anticipated.  

The film is written and directed by Barry Jenkins, based on an unproduced play by Tarell Alvin McCraney and is based on their childhood experience of growing up gay in a deeply dysfunctional black community in Florida.  What's impressive is that they manage to subvert the stereotypes of the black drug dealer and the crack whore, and the entire concept of masculinity by showing us what they know. The result is a film that feels claustrophobic and melancholy - of a community that is fundamentally dysfunctional, in which its members feel trapped, but where there is some slight hope of escape. It's also a community that feels odd to English eyes insofar as it's so un-diverse - the only white face we see is a cop.

The formal structure of the play carries over to the film: we meet our protagonist at three ages, in three thirty-five minute segments.  In the first part he's a skinny schoolkid called Chiron (Alex R Hibbert), bullied for being camp, who finds solace from his crack addict single mother with a drug dealer called Juan (Mahershala Ali) and his girlfriend, Teresa (Jangle Monae).  Against all expectations, it's the drug dealer who proves caring, understanding and comforting - even going so far as to tell young Chiron that he doesn't need to figure out of he's gay yet, and even if he is, he shouldn't feel ashamed of it.  Moreover, Juan is morally complex, at once judgmental of Chiron's mother's drug addiction, but also conscious that he's the man selling to her.  The power of Ali's performance in this segment is quite dazzling, and I'm not sure the film ever really recovers from his absence.