There is no concept of an average Steve McQueen film. Filmmaker and visual artist Steve McQueen has always had this strange uneasiness about his work, right from the time he started working on features in 2008 with his Irish hunger strike drama, Hunger. His work cannot easily be defined or placed into a specific category. One of the things that seems to guide McQueen is the focus on grand struggles such as battles between nations or wars on minorities and how they are experienced intricately and viscerally. Yet again this is more of a tendency than the sedimentary characteristic for a director who went from depicting the stringent life of a sex addict in ‘Shame’ to a haunting maternal odyssey of slavery in ‘Twelve Years a Slave.’ From there on, she transitioned to direct the taut heist drama ‘Widows’ and ‘Small Axe’, a collection of romances about the West Indian community in London.
McQueen’s latest films are set during World War II, and yet they could hardly be more different. ‘Occupied City’, the documentary McQueen completed last year, was a work of formal boldness and a lengthy four and a half hours, presenting Aan Amsterdam the nazi-occupied history of what took place at each site interspersed with commonplace clips of contemporary life spread over 4 hours and a half. His latest work, ‘Blitz’ is a sentimentally personal odyssey of London in 1940, about a child called George (Elliott Heffernan) who during the train ride where he and other children are being taken away from London to the countryside terrifically floods the adult supervision with questions about why they do such dastardly things to London, pushing them to get off the train headed to the countryside only to go searching for his mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan in a very unusual for her role, which strongly relies on her more than is the case, only being a supporting actress) while they are still in London.
The statement holds properly when considering the context, even if Saying this is the weakest film of McQueen, is still coming from a person, who has been making films since quite a while. But in the case of Blitz, this was never the case, and that’s why the reputation of its film’s lead is being systematically compromised. They were complicated attempts to depict internal menaces with facial appeal and convincing background narration that intended to explain why the pro-voice character was constantly hiding from whoever intended to send him away somewhere. Its episodic journeys are styled with a grand perspective and combine some elements of the voracious more layer children’s fiction, which plays no more shamelessly than the point where recounts about George getting besieged by thieves and porn watching Graham spins a fairy tale about a pint of beer supplier whose role requires being a squirt and breaking into places.
However, the film Blitz does not have the Dickensian force of the story that moves the young boy from one dangerous encounter to the next. It is through George that one can view London struggling to remain together with its aid torn by the terror of German planes, which are like terrifying images through the spotlight, nightly meted out by bombs from above. But the film doesn’t trust the world through the father’s eyes and so loses some of its frenzied energy of rushing to see what next George repulses, this time checking in to see Rita as she makes her way into the munitions factory, because she was looking forward to a childless evening in a pub, only to spend it with the neighbor who loves her (Harris Dickinson) instead, who turns out to be a volunteer at the shelter, and finally hears that her son is nowhere to be seen.
It’s the same sense of adult regress that we see in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck. In the same sense it looks like a man who is trying to see the world from the perspective of a child. Not achieving this successfully. The conclusive form of its objectives becomes a negative factor as he has to go through the depiction of the barbarism and compassion that people embody. He is not a stranger to the latter though- George’s father, a Grenadian immigrant who was deported in the early days of George’s life after some racists attributed an attack to him, is Marcus CJ Beckford. George has spent his life being shouted slurs by adults and other children, a life history that in all ways explains his cold attitude towards taking a train to an unfamiliar place and meeting passengers- many of whom he prognosticates would be holding similar beliefs.
By placing Blitz in the shoes of a biracial kid who has been left alone in the mayhem of a war-ravaged nation, McQueen tries to both debunk any monolithic propaganda images constructed during this age that represented it as one of constant unwavering, resolute determination and further the evolvement of a British patriotic notion from only including nice Nigerian ARP wardens, devoted Jewish community leaders and, later, George himself who performs an astonishing act of gallantry during a daring incident at an underground station. The vision and ambition that Blitz has to transform sepia-tinted romanticized historical mythology to a broader and less genteel one is admirable. But it has also moved the film more than it ought to have.
Blitz is more traditional than McQueen’s previous works but that wouldn’t be a problem had McQueen accepted that outright. However, his film has tangents and slab-cut scenes, which seem to hint that the central story he chose to unfold must be tedious for him. Blitz has the typical musical appeal with a sparkly nightclub scene, dance shots back from the jazz bar which are reminiscent of dance-floor scenes in Lovers Rock, and Ronan singing a song meant for radio in the presence of her colleagues. These scenes come off as so exaggerated that one may only consider them as a distraction because the film forces its young star to encounter trauma after trauma which almost feels absurd – like George has been placed in a two-decade-across-geography timeline remake of 1917 without having an uninterrupted-shot gimmick. Blitz has to rely on other plot machinations to keep itself going instead and to keep the protagonist in the city but unable to make his way home. Had it been able to trust its innocent bang-bang heroine to head the show during its silences in addition to its major acts, these may have felt less uncomfortable.
Pero más bien el Blitz te deja pensando no en esas atrocidades de la guerra y en la manera en que estas se cementan dentro de la memoria colectiva, sino en que siempre hay que hacerle caso a la madre.
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