Director: Jeff Nichols; Starring: Ruth Negga, Joel Edgerton, Christopher Mann, Nick Kroll, Martin Csokas, Michael Shannon. Cert tbc, 123 mins.
A couple sit on the porch of their house at night. “I’m pregnant,” she says. There’s a pause. “Good,” he replies after a bit, with a tentative smile. The pause is understandable. The news is good, but it’s also big – even bigger than usual. Mildred Jeter (Ruth Negga) is black, and Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton) is white. And since it’s the 1950s, and they live in the US state of Virginia, what they’ve done is illegal.
Loving couple: the mixed-race marriage trailblazers who inspired a Cannes favourite
Jeff Nichols’s sensational new film Loving, which screened earlier today at Cannes, retells Mildred and Richard’s story with clear eyes, a cool head, and a heart as hot as molten silver. It follows the Lovings from their marriage in 1958 in a courthouse across the state line in Washington D.C., where no law preventing interracial marriage had ever been enacted, to the Virginia court hearing that saw them banished from their home state under threat of imprisonment, and through the years of legal and social tumult that followed. The couple's relationship finally prompted the overturning of those laws nationwide.