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Justice as it is seen

If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)
If Beale Street Could Talk film.png
If we learn anything from the biography of Ruben 'Hurricane' Carter and the 'Innocence Project', one thing is clear. There is no justice. The act of upholding the law and maintaining peace is just a facade to dupe everyone into believing that everything is hunky dory. Well, it is far from the truth for the voiceless and the economically deprived. They always get the short end of the stick. The slum dweller, the coloured, the illiterate and the poor invariably end up as part of the statistics for society to brag about the progress they had made. The elites and the haves more often than not escape punishment. Like it or not, the world is not fair. Justice remains only poetic to sooth the romantics and a promise to the helpless in the afterlife.

 Set in the 1970s, at a time when racial discrimination still reared its ugly head despite what The Civil Rights Act and Martin Luther King Jr's death made us believe, the film is a love story of two young black Americans. The story is based on James Baldwin's epic novel with the same name.

 Growing together in the poor side of the family, the couple was about to start to build a home when the boy is arrested for rape. Even though the charges seem trumped up by a vengeful cop and there are many loopholes in the investigation, the system makes it so difficult for a black man to be freed.

 The film speaks volumes of reality not only in the American marketplace but of many backyards in the four corners of the world.


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Location: Kuala Lumpur, Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

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