Barry Jenkins' 2016 film Moonlight is a coming-of-age film that follows the life of a homosexual black man named Chiron. It has a unique style, where it broke his life up into three chapters. The first chapter is titled Little and takes place when he is a kid. He meets Juan, a drug dealer, when he is running away from other kids who are chasing him and calling him names. In the first chapter, Juan acts as a father figure for Chiron as he often runs away from his house to go to Juan's house. Juan has a roommate Terresa who is somewhat of a mother figure for Chiron. Later in the chapter, we find out that Chiron's mom is a drug addict. Chapter two follows Chiron when he is a teenager. He still is dealing with bullies and his drug-addicted mother. He spends the night at Teresa's house because his mom told him he had to leave the house for the night. It seems that he would often go to Juan and Terresa's house while growing up. We find out that Juan died and seems like Chiron didn't take it well. Chiron has a dream where he sees a classmate Kevin have sex. The next night Kevin and Chiron have a sexual experience without each other while smoking a blunt. The next day Kevin beats up Chiron because Chiron's bully told Kevin to beat him up. The next day Chiron hits his bully with a chair and gets arrested. In chapter two, Chiron is an adult, and we find out he became a drug dealer in Atlanta. He gets a call from Kevin, who is now a chef at a diner. Chiron visits his mom who is now in a rehab facility and then he goes to Kevin's diner. They catch up and then go back to Kevin's house and they have another moment.
Moonlight was a unique film with the three chapter style. I thought it worked decently with the plot of the film. When going from chapter 2 to chapter 3 it made sense to skip ahead to when Chiron was out of jail. I do wish that we saw more interactions between Juan and Chiron because it seemed like Chiron based his life off of Juan's life. I do think that there are some disadvantages to the three chapters. One of those is that we miss out on a lot of potential information of the story like what exactly happened to Juan. I think that this could be better if it was like a series of like hour long movie/shows where we can see more of Chiron's life during the different times. This style of film/tv show wasn't popular when this movie came out, so it makes sense that they it the way they did. Overall the movie was decent and I don't think I would have watched if it wasn't assigned to watched. It just isn't the type of movie that I usally watch.
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