Life is remembered and recollected in moments. If successfull, the moments become "milestones", if otherwise, "turning points" (euphemistically saying, that is). Remember that moment in the early throes of childhood when the veil of innocence drops for the first time and the world presents itself as the merciless and heartless entity that it is? Recollect the moment when as a young adult the heart first beats (and later breaks) for that one first true love? While the important moments in later stages of life can be explained away using reason and logic, the early impressions, devoid of both of those faculties, leave an indelible mark on one's life that, in a way, shapes and moulds it. The first hard slap across the face of the child (when it is least expecting it) shocks it into a rude awakening of the first lesson of safety and survival, not to mention, the first conflicted emotion about the cause of the assault (was it something that he did?). While in school, the first 'real' fight in the school yard that gets the nose bloodied and the head reeling redefines the concept of friendship, introducing into it the idea of an 'enemy' for the first time. And then the constant picking on the way the child looks, walks, talks and behaves by the world around rips apart the foundation of a benign and a rosy world that has been built up till then in the cozy comfort of the home, and breaks the ground for a new world order, built entirely on cruelty, judgment, partiality, and to counter them all, survival. This is the path of not just one child, but everyone of them, with the only difference being the degree of violation (and therefore the speed of erasure) of one'e innocence. This is "normal", this is the act of "growing up", justifies the world. If everyone goes through similar hardships, regardless of how intolerable and unbearable it is, it is a "life lesson", explains the world. And the sooner one learns all those, the better it will be for him - is also another justification that the world offers to balm over the deep scars. And piling on those, what about the bitter truths about class, religion, caste, race, sexuality, gender identity and many such puzzles of life that confound even the grown ups? Are they still "Lessons" then? Or "Hard Truths"? Or that complex compound word used to brush and file everything under - "Life"?

'Moonlight' raises the bar even further for its impoverished, weak and conflicted child protagonist by making him black, living in a drug infested project, constantly picked upon and bullied, and as though these weren't enough, has questions about his sexuality (though not in those exact words, not at least then). The movie merely chronicles and observes the three different stages in that kid's life, first, as a child, then a boy, and finally as a man without intervening with things like plot, twists or even a story. It makes no judgments, nor takes any sides. This is not a social commentary about the living conditions of the destitute and desparate living on the peripheries of society, struggling to cope with the process of growing. Instead it just presents, without any appeal. Much like in life, the kids who pick on others in school, or the young ones who bully the weaker lot, or even the adults who rise and fall, live and die in the drug business, are not "bad", per se. When a weaker ground caves in, the sand, the dirt, the pebbles and the stones quickly rush in, in no particular order, pushing and shoving past one another, sometimes ending on the top and sometimes at the bottom, to fill the crater up to settle things, albeit at a different level. Life is pretty much like the creation of those craters at periodic intervals. Everything is built up in those moments of caving in. Enemies in those moments, friends in those moments, joys, disappointments, agony, anger, all exist for that fleeting moment, which, after the crater fills in and things settle down, cease to evoke and rouse the same emotions that welled up in those moments. So what "lesson" can be deduced from such a life filled with constant strife, that can serve as a guiding beacon to the ones that follow it? As the movie depicts through the many vignettes of that struggling childhood and young adulthood of a black gay boy, the only lesson that life can aspire to teach is one of empathy, nothing more. It doesn't hand out winning formulae that can be emulated, or lay down a map of potential minefield that can be carefully stepped around. The best that life can do is show, and not teach. And as the movie points out, everything appears blue under 'Moonlight'.

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