THE KITCHEN** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 Closing Night Gala

Acclaimed actor Daniel Kaluuya (JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH) turns his hand to writing and directing in partnership with Joe Murtagh (AMERICAN ANIMALS) and Kibwe Tavares respectively.  Together they have crafted a film that is superficially a dystopian political nightmare about gentrification and police brutality.  But it soon becomes apparent that the film's real themes are of fatherhood and community. 

The film takes place in The Kitchen - the last piece of social housing in London. The government wants the residents cleared out so that they can build luxury flats instead, and when the residents refuse to leave they are punished by having their utilities cut off and periodic brutal police raids. Against this backdrop we meet Izi - a cynical man desperate to leave The Kitchen for luxury housing but constrained by the sudden appearance of a young boy called Benji who may be his son. What are the stakes of this film? At first we think they are whether Izi will have the money to move out. Then we think it's going to be a struggle for Benji's future - on the straight and narrow with Izi or joining a biker gang. 

Part of my problem with this film is that actually the dystopian future idea is never particularly well fleshed out. We are just meant to understand - instinctively - as contemporary Londoners - that the housing situation is rigged. Maybe we do - but will global audiences?  My second issue is that there are literally zero female characters that matter. In 2023. In a progressive, politically aware film.  Seriously? I guess the writers might say that this is because the entire point of the film is to focus on fatherhood, and that its key narrative arc is a selfish man taking on that responsibility. Maaaaybe. Overall, the film just feels underwritten and lugubrious. I enjoyed the creation of The Kitchen in the first hour but very little actually happened.  As I said, I could and did enjoy derping around with these characters for a while. I really enjoyed the more informal banter about cardamom flavoured pancakes and Hawaiian dancer lamps. But at some point we need to get out of The Shire.

In front of the lens, Kane Robinson/Kano (Top Boy) shows little range as Izi, playing him as looking conflicted and staring into the middle distance all the time. He doesn't have much help from a script that makes him taciturn so this role needed some good, nuanced facial acting and we just didn't get it.  We are on far more impressive ground with Jedaiah Bannerman, who is both heart-breaking and hilarious as Benji. He is an actor to watch.  I will also confess that I got a thrill from seeing Ian Wright playing the voice and heart of The Kitchen, a DJ who spins classic vinyl while preaching solidarity. As a Gooner, I could happily watch hours of Wrighty vibing along to classic tracks. I am pleased and relieved to say that this is no cheap cameo either: Lord Kitchener is the emotional heartbeat of the plot.

Behind the lens, production design did wonders with what I suspect was a small budget. I loved the grungy, vibrant, rotting, exciting, space of The Kitchen.  It felt real somehow, and something worth fighting for, which is really important. This also felt disturbingly like the present - maybe because the budget to do anything too radical wasn't there - maybe because the film-makers were making a point - maybe because I am so familiar with the shooting locations I knew exactly where they were. Isn't it funny how people wanting to create the future always come back to my beloved brutalist notorious Barbican Centre?  I also really loved the aural landscape of this film - the richness and diversity of hearing a cappella gospel; bass-thumping EDM; and classic tracks from Lord Kitchener. But films start and end with scripts and this one needed another pass.

THE KITCHEN has a running time of 104 minutes, is rated R, and will be released on Netflix in 2024.

JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH

JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH is a stunningly made, deeply affecting, beautifully acted, chamber drama about the events that led to the real life assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in 1969 at the age of just 21. His age is startling when we see him portrayed with such power, conviction and charisma in an award-winning performance by British actor Daniel Kaluuya. His Hampton is thickly accented, profoundly articulate and rousing in his stirring message of black activism and social aid. We are carried away by his powerful presence, just as Dominique Fishback's quiet poetry-loving student Deborah Johnson is, and her subtle but profound performance is equally award-worthy.  She is swept up in Hampton's activism, falls heavily pregnant and has to look on in admiration but also fear as he becomes increasingly convinced of his forthcoming martyrdom. So much of her performance is wordless, and she manages to convey so much conflicting emotion through her eyes. It's deeply impressive. 

The third person in this four-hand psychological drama is LaKeith Stanfield's William O'Neal. When we first meet him he's impersonating a cop and boosting cars. The Feds hold the threat of jail time over him and force him to become an informat. Pretty soon he's Hampton's trusted head of security, and we feel that he absolutely believes in Fred's mission even while snitching on him. The deep tragedy of  O'Neal's situation - conveyed in a subtle and heart-breaking performance by Stanfield - is the counterpoint to the tragedy of Deborah Johnson's situation.  We know that she will have to raise her child alone as the widow of a slain activst. And we know that O'Neal's guilt at his role in that FBI assassination will lead to his suicide, despite his on-tape assertion that he just did what he had to do.  

The final player in this four-hander is Jesse Plemons' FBI agent Roy Mitchell. He is also an equivocal character. This is best summed up in the final scene between Mitchell and O'Neal in a restaurant peopled entirely by white diners and staff.  Both characters are ostensibly setting up an assassination and doing so willingly - Mitchell to serve the Bureau's political aims; O'Neal to secure financial freedom.  But each looks utterly uncomfortable. Mitchell knows the FBI is rotten and that this is unjustifiable extra-judicial murder but he's a career man. And O'Neal is just so far stepped in blood it would be as hard to wade back as to go forward.

The resulting film is a profoundly moving and important biopic that teaches us how impressive Hampton was, and how despicable was the plot to take him down, and the toll it took on those who did it, and those who were left behind. It cleaves as closely to the historical record as a work of fiction can. It is perfect? Not quite. A cameo from Martin Sheen as J Edgar Hoover was utterly unnecessary and cartoonish. But pretty much everything else is so beautifully rendered as to make this one of the most outstanding films of the year. I cannot wait to see what director Shaka King does next.

JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH is rated R and has a running time of 126 minutes. It played Sundance 2021 and was released on the internet on February 12th.

QUEEN & SLIM

QUEEN & SLIM is a powerful and moving film - at turns hilarious and unbearably tense. It stars Daniel Kaluuya (GET OUT) and Jodie Turner-Smith as a young black couple who go out on a tinder date. He drives her home, a cop pulls them over, she tries to assert their rights (being an attorney) and ends up being shot.  He kills the cop in self-defense.  This is all done in the first fifteen or so minutes. The tonal shift is beautifully handled. We go from a beautifully observed first date between an odd couple so ill-matched that they barely occupy the same frame, to a moment of violence that's genuinely frightening.  We've all seen the video footage of real life policy brutality and racism. But in that slow build-up to the shooting I had a glimpse, for just a nanosecond, of what it must feel like to be pulled over as a black man.  It was terrifying and deeply affecting.

The rest of the film is a road movie, beautifully shot by cinematographer Tat Radcliffe.  The south has never looked so empty and so vivid and so gorgeous.  They visit with her uncle, hilariously played by Bokeem Woodbine (TV's FARGO), in a role that rises above absurdist pimp and hustler. We learn that he was deeply fucked up by Iraq and that their family history is deeply scarred. I also love the cameo role from Indya Moore (POSE) - who with barely a look can steer her supposedly macho lover into doing the right thing. It's quite the demonstration of power. 

Their journey continues. On the way we'll get one of the most sensuous joyous road-house scenes since Lynch - and it's worth saying that the music in this film is brilliantly chosen and even allows an hilarious Fat vs Skinny Luther Vandross debate. 

We also get to see both sides of the argument.  Screenwriters Lena Waithe and the notorious James Frey show us the true cost of being runaway heroes - the danger of inspiring young black kids to stand up to violence - that violence begets violence -and somehow in a world where there are black cops too, it always seem to be black people who end up dead.  

The screenwriters also pose provocative questions.  Should we really make an analogy between Queen and Slim and Bonnie and Clyde?  The movie does - riffing on the iconography of that movie - and in a meta way the kids in the film do too. But Bonnie and Clyde were genuine criminals.  Queen and Slim are law-abiding citizens in a world where the law has been made corrupt and racist. They are criminals because they are black.  

Another provocation is who we should trust.  There's a fantastic scene in a supposed safe house owned by Flea and Chloe Sevigny.  He wants to help them. She is more reluctant. Should we believe that she is tempted by the bounty on their heads? I love the ambiguity that the screenwriters are willing to make us endure.  We never know why the husband and wife are so well set up for smuggling. Or why the husband has a preternatural sensitivity to seeing the shadows of a SWAT team on his dining room wall. I almost wish that the screenwriters had left the question of whom to trust open at the end. 

Overall, QUEEN & SLIM is a truly intelligent and beautifully handled film.  Kudos to first-time feature film director Melina Matsoukas and to Lena Waithe and James Frey for their nuanced and challenging script. But most of all, kudos to Daniel Kaluuya, who goes from puppy-dog naivety and goodness to something wiser, tougher, and more fulfilled. It's an astonishing performance. First time feature actor Jodie Turner-Smith holds her own too.  But it's Kaluuya, and Woodbine in support, who really deserved the award-season recognition and I'm saddened this film hasn't received the marketing push to facilitate that. 

QUEEN & SLIM has a running time of 132 minutes and is rated R. The film was released in the USA last November and will be released in the UK on January 31st 2020. 

WIDOWS - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Opening Night Gala

In the early 1980s the soon to be celebrated thriller writer Lynda La Plante created a British TV miniseries called WIDOWS. It was about a group of women who decide to carry out the heist that their late husbands planned, rather than succumb to pressure from the police, and a rival gang, to turn over the late mastermind's book of secrets. All along their secret weapon is that everybody underestimates them. No-one conceives that a bunch of housewives could pull this off. Apparently this tale of under-estimation and prejudice spoke to a young London schoolboy called Steve McQueen and 35 years later the now acclaimed director (12 YEARS A SLAVE) has recreated the heist film but bringing his own brand of art-house style, deep emotional contemplation and political provocation to it.  I loved many elements of this reworking - particularly its visual style and its strong central performance from Viola Davis (THE HELP).  But I found the contemplative pace undermined the thriller, and the politics, while valid, was extremely heavy-handed. Overall, the film was a disappointment, and my least favourite of his films to date.

Let's talk about what's great first.  This is a film with a beautiful visual style and sensitivity - whether in its eye for detail and location, or in the way the camera is positioned and used. Speaking to the former, McQueen really immerses himself in the diversity of life in contemporary Chicago - whether the stunning laeshore apartment of Viola Davis' Veronica and her late husband Harry (Liam Neeson) - filled with beautiful objet d'art and stylish furniture - or the overcrowded warm-hued hair salon that the heist driver Belle (Cynthia Erivo) works at. Early on there's a tour-de-force scene inter-cutting the various gang members' funerals that beautifully shows the different churches and traditions of mourning. This is a film profoundly concerned with architecture.  One of the most impressive scenes that highlights this is one in which Colin Farrell's corrupt politician drives from the impoverished ward in which he's campaigning to his swanky town house. The camera stays outside the car rather than on the people conversing within it. We don't know why until it pulls up at the town house - and then we realise that we have been seeing a short journey from poverty to wealth, and that McQueen is wearing a particular point about the plebs and the elite.  Time and again we're treated to moments like this - when the camera angle or movement is just doing something subtle and above and beyond the standard direction. Or even a final scene in a cafe with mirrored pillars, where we see both Veronica and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) reflected in pillars looking away from each other. 

Now here's where the film doesn't quite work. It's being marketed as a heist but it's not really interested in that. It's really a contemplative piece about mourning and female self-empowerment and a political commentary on corruption, racial and gender prejudice. The first theme allows us to see some superb acting from Viola Davis but substantially weighs on the pace of the film. I didn't mind too much because I knew I was watching a McQueen film and expected something more slow-paced but I was wondering how mainstream audiences might react. I also think the film is rather unbalanced. Viola Davis just blows us away.  But Michelle Rodriguez is remarkably anonymous as her fellow widow - Elizabeth Debicki looks like wounded Bambi and has a rather heavy-handed and obvious journey to empowerment - in fact the only interesting woman other than Veronica is Belle. As for the men, I'll leave it to you to judge whether you believe Harry's motivation. The other gang members are anonymous.  The opposition gang is ludicrously drawn - Daniel Kaluuya's gangster jumps the shark repeatedly.  The only real interest for me came from Colin Farrell's politician and a hilariously angry cameo from Robert Duvall as his father. 

Finally, let's speak to politics. I get it. These are angry times.  But do we really need something as on the nose as a cop gunning down a black kid with no provocation as a major plot motivator, while Obama Hope posters flutter in the background?  Do we really need basically the entire Alice/Debicki arc?  I don't decry being political but let's have some more sophistication about how we do it. For instance, I could argue that just have Viola Davis on screen with her natural hair - just having the movie open with a passionate inter-racial kiss - just being able to show even-handed corruption between the black church and the white alderman - is politically provocative and far more interesting.

WIDOWS will be released in the UK on November 9th and in the USA on November 16th.