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Earlier this year, the British filmmaker Steve McQueen released Occupied City, a four-hour documentary companion to his partner Bianca Stigter\u2019s book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945. Building by building, street by street, it mapped out its stories of fascistic brutality and brave resistance, presenting those same places as they appear to us today. Its point was simple, but deeply effective: we are surrounded and consumed by history, and blind to it only by our own folly. Time and time again, it circles back to look us in the eye.<\/p>\n
Blitz, McQueen\u2019s fifth feature after Hunger, Shame, 12 Years a Slave and Widows, builds on those ideas until they swell into a symphony. It\u2019s a war picture, in the more conventional mould, that feels new and revelatory purely because it\u2019s being viewed through the eyes of its singular director \u2013 expressionist yet rarely sentimental, disquieting in its terrors yet tender in its hope, and profoundly interested in the ordinary lives of others.<\/p>\n
It draws on the kind of story once commonplace in children\u2019s literature, as the protagonists of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Goodnight Mister Tom pack their suitcases and flee London for the safety of the British countryside. Rita (Saoirse Ronan), in 1940, does the same for her boy George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan), who we discover harbours the same adventurousness as those literary protagonists. He leaps from a moving train and embarks on his odyssey through the city to find his way back into his mother\u2019s arms.<\/p>\n
There he\u2019ll find charity and bigotry, air-raid wardens (Benjamin Clementine) and criminals (the always wonderful Kathy Burke and Stephen Graham). And, through the topography of his city, he will start to understand himself as a young Black boy, a quiet revelation communicated with such grace through Heffernan\u2019s performance. He\u2019s a stoic boy, in a way that seems to confront us as an audience, yet never severed from all the fear, loneliness, and mischief of a child in wartime. Ronan, too, shows the same dynamism, as she captures every shade of a mother\u2019s love.<\/p>\n
Much will be (and already has been) made about Blitz\u2019s depiction of a diverse London, still a relative rarity on film. It\u2019s historically accurate. Not much more needs to be said \u2013 yet the film\u2019s corrective power doesn\u2019t come solely from who McQueen chooses to depict, but how he and his cinematographer Yorick Le Saux choose to frame the city\u2019s spaces.<\/p>\n
Blitz is drawn to the small details. At one point, the camera travels deep into a bustling jazz club, based on the Cafe de Paris, only to take a detour into the kitchen, in silent acknowledgement of joy\u2019s unseen labours. While the crowds shelter from bombs, unsure whether they\u2019ll live to see the morning\u2019s light, the camera looks curiously across to see a couple in the discreet but frenzied throes of love.<\/p>\n
Across his four previous films, his TV anthology Small Axe, and his entire work as a visual artist, McQueen has repeatedly circled back to the idea of power. Yet it\u2019s rarely presented as a simplistic, binary divide between oppressor and oppressed. Rather it\u2019s an entire infrastructure, one powered by capitalism and monotonous except when touched by human fallibility. In Blitz, Hans Zimmer\u2019s thunderous, relentless score transforms itself into the machine of war, the crunch of metal against metal, or the whistle-whir of death falling from the sky.<\/p>\n
Saoirse Ronan, Elliott Heffernan and Paul Weller in \u2018Blitz\u2019 (Apple)Here is a film with the moral clarity to challenge the populist narrative of the \u201cBlitz spirit\u201d and the idea that wartime solidarity was immediate and universal, while simultaneously celebrating the hope that rises out of community. Intolerance persists, while authority refuses to serve the needs of the people, who clamour for the city\u2019s Underground stations to be opened up as bomb shelters. Beneath the streets, real-life figure Mickey Davies (Leigh Gill), oversees a shelter with its own free medical service, years before the founding of the NHS.<\/p>\n
McQueen, who also wrote the film\u2019s script, is acutely aware of the cinematic legacy behind him. It\u2019s a period documented, honoured, and reinterpreted a hundred times on screen before. Yet it\u2019s what he sees and how he sees it, as one of Britain\u2019s most extraordinary filmmakers, that makes Blitz feel monumental.<\/p>\n
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Try for freeDir: Steve McQueen. Starring: Elliott Heffernan, Saoirse Ronan, Harris Dickinson, Benjamin Clementine, Kathy Burke, Paul Weller, Stephen Graham, Erin Kellyman, Leigh Gill. 12A, 120 mins.<\/p>\n
\u2018Blitz\u2019 is screening at the BFI London Film Festival and is released in selected cinemas on 1 November, before streaming on Apple TV+ from 22 November<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeGet our The Life Cinematic email for free I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our\u00a0privacy policy Earlier this year, the British filmmaker Steve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3706,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n