Steve McQueen made a series of powerful TV specials under the banner of Small Axe, showing the experience of black people living in London in the 1960s. In doing so, he was showing stories that had been under- or mis-represented. The mission of his new feature film, BLITZ, is exactly the same. He wants to show the viewer just how multicultural London already was two decades before Windrush, and how the same prejudice blighted the lives of its black residents.
As with Small Axe, some of the best scenes in BLITZ are those centred around music. There's a tremendous flashback scene set in a dance hall where you feel the music pulse. There's an even better scene set in a luxurious Cafe de Paris style nightclub with a Cab Calloway style performer and the real-life pop star Celeste. And music is woven into other scenes - whether cockneys playing a washboard or gathered around a piano in the pub.
It's hard to fault the way the film is put together. The recreation of bombed out East End streets - the peril and terror of houses on fire - the smouldering vistas the next morning. It's all immaculately recreated. And it's hard to fault McQueen's earnest message of brotherly love. The problem is that this isn't a series of music -centred short films (as it probably should've been) but a feature film - and a feature film needs narrative propulsion and characters we care about.
We don't care about these characters because they are thinly drawn avatars. Good guys vs racists. Saoirse Ronan's single mum Rita is good. The Fagin-style thieves played by Kathy Burke, Stephen Graham and Roddy from Slow Horses are bad. The almost angelic air raid warden Ife is good. And really good because he let's Rita's mixed-race son George feel proud of his blackness. The nasty racist cockneys who want to put a sheet up to isolate the Sikhs are bad. It goes on and on.
To make it worse, thin characterisation is met with thin dialogue. And the poor kid - Elliott Heffernan - is given very little to do as George. He only exists to allow McQueen to follow his steps through the various vignettes that McQueen is actually interested in showing us.
I also feel that - fatally - this film is miscast in its lead role. Ronan cannot do a convincing East End accent and she also cannot sing. Having her lip sync to someone else's voice brings us out of the film. For a character whose life is expressed in music - whose love for her son and father is shown through music - this is a real problem.
BLITZ is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 113 minutes. BLITZ will be released in cinemas on November 1st and on Netflix on November 22nd.
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