The Film Experience is celebrating Valentine's Day! Here's Daniel...
Rarely does a film show the restorative power of love like Gina Prince-Bythewood’s alive and swoony Beyond the Lights. While the film has much more on its mind than hooking up – from reconciling depression to machinating local politics – its undeniable electricity sparks from the mindmeld that allows each of its two leads to be seen for the first time and fly in whichever direction they choose.
Prefabricated pop star Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, flawless) literally lives in chains, bound between the blinding glare of paparazzi flashbulbs and a suffocating armada of handlers that exploit her image in the name of the game. Kaz (Sundance darling Nate Parker) is a cop on her detail living under the blue-and-red burden of prefixed expectations. He grabs her hand after she jumps off a hotel balcony. There’s no meet cute here; it’s a spiritual lifting.
By the time they escape to Mexico in the second act, it’s a soul-clearing breath of fresh air. Gone are the crushing schedules and growing media and familial firestorms around their relationship – here, it’s breezy, freeform, and awash in the possibility of pure sunlight. And, thankfully for the audience, they spend much of their time in and around bed.
This dreamy Baja sequence envelops you in a warm embrace, starting wide and hugging closer to Noni and Kaz. As a prelude to some truly sensational sex, they shake out the sheets together, making up the bed – their cloud in the sun above the ashes they've left behind. Fighting pillows give chase to trading tongues and they sensually sweep away all structure and sense of time. Each cut reveals a different position, literally and figuratively, that flows into the next as they build each other up and clutch each other's bare skin for dear life.
What makes this sexiest – apart from two gorgeous people worshipping each other – is consent. Compared to the world’s sex object expectations and a previous scene of onstage sexual abuse, Noni pursuing her own desire instead of bowing down to leering masses is nothing short of freedom. As Kaz sleeps, she takes a knife to the purple weave of her producers and cuts out their influence. She steps out, no longer resembling an infantilized product but an independent woman with the newfound power to run her own world. And she’s seen.
Our Valentine's Series
A Room With a View (1986)
Shakespeare in Love (1998)
Before Sunset (2004)
The Painted Veil (2006)
Love Songs (2007)
(500) Days of Summer (2009)
Beyond the Lights (2014)