Wyatt Cenac

(On Cable TV, July 2022) Some films are clearly ennobled by the later actions and renown of their cast and crew. Medicine for Melancholy would be a perfectly respectable low-budget romance no matter who was in it or what they did afterwards—as an off-beat romantic drama featuring two young people spending a short cut intense time together in San Francisco, it has the flavour of the French New Wave, the city-celebrating charge of something like Before Sunset, the social engagement of ambitious independent filmmakers and a unique visual signature to its severely desaturated cinematography. But here’s the thing: its writer-director Barry Jenkins went on to direct the Academy-Award-winning Moonlight and so Medicine for Melancholy suddenly became far more important as a piece of juvenilia. But if that’s juvenilia, then most people should be so lucky as to have that on their filmography: After a bit of a rough start with gratuitously desaturated visuals and characters that aren’t the most warmly sympathetic, the film eventually finds its groove: Wyatt Cenac becomes more interesting as time goes by, while the striking Tracey Heggins sees her character warm up and reveal more of herself. Soon enough, the romantic talk becomes a proxy argument—between his proudly radical black agenda and her more inclusive viewpoint, between his activism in trying to save San Francisco from the alien technocratic monsters displacing the less fortunate inhabitants of the city and her more cosmopolitan assimilation-friendly outlook. As the cliché holds, San Francisco is an intrusive third character here, as the housing crisis plays as a backdrop to a romance between two increasingly rare black people in San Francisco. With such tensions at play, it’s a disappointment but not a surprise if the ending is less upbeat than you would expect—Jenkins isn’t known as an ebullient comic director, after all, and Medicine for Melancholy wears its glum outlook in its title. Still, it’s a strong novice entry for him, and one that clearly announces the mixture of character-based drama and social issues that would characterize his later films. It’s all the more effective for having been completed on a shoestring budget. Those who make a point of tracking down the film after seeing Jenkins’s later movies will not be disappointed.