Writer-director Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter, Mud, Midnight Special) showed his fifth feature at this 69th Cannes and Loving immediately garnered plenty of buzz, with some unequivocally declaring it one of the festival's best. Loving is a quietly understated telling of one of the lesser known and yet crucial episodes in the American struggle for civil rights: the landmark (and never more  appropriately titled) case of Loving v. Virginia. That is the case in which the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Mildred and Richard Loving  who had been arrested for being an interracial married couple – an illegal act in Virginia and 16 other Southern states. It was a crucial step in ridding the country of its segregationist and racist legacy whose memory, as Nichols himself pointed out speaking to the HFPA in Cannes, is largely lost to better known episodes like the desegregation of Little Rock schools and the Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

The facts, dating from an incredibly recent 1967 – the date of the Supreme Court ruling –  resonate loudly as the 50th anniversary approaches. The obvious reference being the recent federal legalization of same sex marriages (in which Loving was expressly cited by the Justices as legal precedent). The racial overtones also speak loudly as the first African American president’s tenure comes to a close on the backdrop of a country still struggling to come to terms with relations between races.

In Nichols’ film we find Richard (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred (Ruth Negga) living the spare workaday life of tobacco farmers in Caroline county Virginia, a poor countryside where blacks and whites live in the familiarity bred by generations of common lifestyle. Although technically illegal because of the anti miscegenation laws carried over from slavery days, Richard and Mildred's cohabitation is seemingly tolerated. However when they return after getting married in nearby Washington DC, the authorities move to act: sheriff’s deputies burst into the Loving home as they sleep, rousting the couple and arresting both.

Although not physically violent it is a chilling and deeply upsetting scene in which Mr. and (a very pregnant) Mrs. Loving are thrown in jail for the crime of being married. Citing “God’s law” against the mixing of races the judge imposes a one year sentence, suspending it on condition that he couple leave the state for 25 years. It’s an internal exile that underlines how 100 years after the Civil War the US really still was a house divided against itself. 

A few years later, with Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement mobilizing in the background, a letter by Mildred to Attorney General Robert Kennedy results in the activation of the ACLU which assigns the Loving’s case to pro-bono civil rights lawyers. Eventually, after nine years,  the case does make its way to the docket of the Supreme Court and this quietly odious act of injustice is overturned, abolishing all anti- miscegenation statutes and freeing the Lovings to return to their family home.  

Ruth Negga and Joel Edegerton give wonderfully understated portrayals of the reluctant civil rights heroes who fight with dogged dignity for the right to sanction their love. And the film, perhaps formally conventional in the context of an auteur-centric festival like this one, packs a powerful emotional punch. One which is only amplified by the knowledge that at this very moment new legal battles loom between Southern states and the Federal government about the rights of individuals to use public restrooms.