Visually more sophisticated than the bulk of features to yet come out of the new wave of DIY independent American cinema, narratively smoother and yet still boundless in mold-breaking ambition, Medicine for Melancholy offers a self-contained rebuttal to claims that precious, naturalistic dramas about the existential dilemmas of hipster singles are exclusively a white man’s game. But the most exciting thing about the film is that director Barry Jenkins doesn’t seem interested in rebutting anything, or in playing any sort of game but his own. His mission: to talk about what it feels like to be young, black and artsy in a city in which people who fit that description make up a minuscule fraction of the population.
Formally and thematically, Melancholy is, in fact, driven by fractions. African-Americans currently make up less than 7 percent of the city of San Francisco. Several decades of gentrification have all but whitewashed the city’s historically non-white communities south of Market Street; the few non-gentrified pockets still standing are under constant threat of being steamrolled by the luxury housing boom. To make that point visually, Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton literally drain the color almost completely from their digital video image (on first viewing, I guessed that the entirety of the film had been desaturated 93 percent to match the racial breakdown, but in a recent interview, Jenkins said the level of desaturation actually fluctuates). The resulting image is soft and smoggy, mostly gray with pastel hints. Melancholy may be more committed to certain of the city’s un-pretty social truths than any other recent fiction film set in San Francisco, but ironically, as a sheer portrait of the city, it’s also maybe the most beautiful.
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