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Blitz”. Photo: Apple+”/>Between realism, Charles Dickens adventures and the beguiling aesthetic excess of the images: Saoirse Ronan (r.) and Elliott Heffernan in “Blitz”. Photo: Apple + © Apple +
“Blitz,” Steve McQueen’s odyssey of a boy in Nazi-bombed London, is the film of the moment.
The fire hose cannot be tamed. Like a giant snake, he lurches wildly and turns against anyone who tries to give him direction. Several firefighters are blown away, and when they finally control the torrent, it doesn’t seem to have any effect on the devastating effect of the German incendiary bombs.
The first images of the so-called Blitzkrieg against the London civilian population already give Steve McQueen’s drama its direction: a realism of high symbolic power and at the same time almost abstract; open to a beguiling aesthetic excess. Even in his early work as a visual artist, the wonders of experimental film were mixed with the horrors of reality. Like in “Western Deep”, his documentary dive into the exploitative work in a South African diamond mine, which made him world famous at Documenta 2002.
“Blitz” is the sixth feature film by probably the most important British filmmaker of today. It is often claimed that McQueen’s commercially produced works – this one was created for the streaming provider Apple+ – have little to do with his artistic work, but the boundaries are almost fluid: for the bombardment, McQueen cuts a few seconds from Man Ray’s experimental film “Emak Bakia” into his Film for which the avant-garde pioneer scattered nails on a film strip. The scene with the firefighters is also such a quote; a nod to one of Britain’s most famous wartime documentaries, Humphrey Jennings’ Fires Were Started.
In classic war photography, aesthetic penetration doesn’t necessarily have to be glossed over. It intensifies, condenses, creates universality. This also applies to the story of this film, the odyssey of nine-year-old George, whose mother has a heavy heart evacuated from London in 1940. And who jumps out of the train because he doesn’t believe he’ll find new friends there. As soon as he got in, he was teased by his peers because of his skin color. Later flashbacks explain that his father, whom he never knew, was deported from Britain after a racist denunciation.
Flashbacks and daydreams punctuate a children’s story like Charles Dickens. Once, like Oliver Twist, the boy has to escape a gang of gangsters who kidnapped him to help with looting. There’s also a Jack London moment with the adventurous escape over the roofs of railway carriages. And there are glimmers of hope, such as the encounter with a Nigerian-born guard officer who takes fatherly care of Georges before he dies himself.
Steve McQueen has stated that he was inspired to create the character by a photo he found while researching his television series Small Ax. It showed a Black boy with a stoic expression and a baggy coat during the evacuation. With shocking consistency, debut actor Elliott Heffernan now hides his face behind an invisible mask. His grandfather is embodied by another, albeit much more prominent, newcomer to the screen: none other than Britpop pioneer Paul Weller, who sings Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’” at the piano at home with George and his mother Rita, played by Saoirse Ronan. Another storyline is dedicated to Rita’s work in an arms factory, where she appears as a singer on a BBC radio broadcast.
With hundreds of extras, it is the most elaborate scene in the film, a monument to the work of women on the home front, which is rarely represented on film. With the singing, however, the monumentality suddenly turns into intimate, the fragile emotionality in Saoirse Ronan’s voice is reminiscent of Carey Mulligan’s interpretation of “New York, New York” in McQueen’s film drama “Shame”.
The film’s score is also beguilingly haunting, one of Hans Zimmer’s best works, where he comments on a self-programmed synthesizer with classical instrumentation.
Time and again, “Blitz” opens up to such moments of unexpected artistic beauty – as a counterpoint to equally unprepared moments of disgust at everyday racism. Here, McQueen fills gaps in the representation of minorities in classic British war dramas, while at the same time measuring himself against their great masterpieces: the films by the duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, such as “I know where I’m going,” which were recently honored in a documentary produced by Martin Scorsese and A Canterbury Tale. These films, with their strong female characters, told of the fight for survival beyond the battlefield and did not deny the proximity of death, went far beyond the current war at the time.
A film about the slaughter of civilians in World War II knows how tragically relatable it is. McQueen began working on “Blitz” in 2021, and since then war crimes against the civilian population have intensified in Ukraine and the Middle East to an extent that was unforeseeable at the time. Pacifism has rarely had it as difficult as it is now, and that’s precisely why this is the film of the hour.
Blitz. Great Britain 2024. Director: Steve McQueen. 120 min. In cinemas from today, on Apple + from November 22nd
