It’s barely been more than a year since Steve McQueen dedicated himself to the Second World War. In “The Occupied City”, shown on Mubi, the British director tells the story of his adopted home city of Amsterdam in the years 1940-45 for four and a half hours. His new film “Blitz” is limited to a few days in London in the fall of 1940. The parallels are also limited in other ways, because after his documentary work, McQueen is now back in fictional realms.
The title of McQueen’s fifth feature film (not counting the “Small Axe” series) suggests it: his script, which was written entirely without a co-author for the first time, takes place in those months of German air raids on Great Britain and especially London. Single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan), her nine-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan) and their father (musician Paul Weller in his first role as an actor) repeatedly have to seek refuge in shelters and subway shafts at night. Which is why Rita finally decides to accept the authorities’ offer to send the children out to the countryside, where they are believed to be safe for the duration of the air battle.
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But George doesn’t want to separate from his mother, cat and friends, and when the son of a black father is teased by others on a train full of children who have been sent away, he simply jumps out of the moving carriage. As he makes his way back to London on foot, his mother has no idea that her boy never reached his destination. Meanwhile, she is busy working in a munitions factory, where she also takes part in a talent competition organized by the BBC for edification. When she finds out about George’s disappearance, she desperately starts searching, while he has a variety of, not always pleasant, encounters on his way home. But last but not least, the nightly bombs make it difficult for mother and son to see each other again.
McQueen says in an interview that he wanted Blitz to be understood as a dark fairy tale in the style of the Brothers Grimm. This is probably why he focuses on his young protagonist. It is not that the horrors of war are ignored, but the story of the film is characterized by the innocent, naive look of the child, who here – separated from his mother and through the encounter with Gut (Benjamin Clémentine as a Nigerian air raid warden, becomes the saving grace). Angels) and evil (Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke lead a gang of corpse-scavenging gangsters) – undergoes a very special coming-of-age development.
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The excellent young lead actor Elliot Heffernan and the always convincing Saoirse Ronan aren’t the only things worth seeing about Blitz. Jacqueline Durran’s costume design is excellent. The CGI shots of the half-destroyed east London look convincing, and visual gimmicks such as close-ups of falling warheads or black-and-white daisy meadows reference McQueen’s earlier work as a video artist. Thematically, he has a lot to say, as this supposedly uplifting story of survival is also about racism and structural disadvantage of the working class, the dark side of empire and the remnants of colonialism.
However, that’s far too much for this two-hour film – and the fact that Harris Dickinson as a firefighter hardly gets to do more than make Ronan look good suggests that a lot of things in “Blitz” fell victim to the scissors. What remains is a film that could have done with a lot more of the restraint that McQueen showed in “Hunger,” for example, instead of embracing every narrative and visual cliché and throwing any subtlety overboard in the dialogue.
