10/10/2024 - Steve McQueen’s heart-on-the-sleeve drama recreates a pivotal moment in Britain’s World War II experience

Speaking to critic Jonathan Rosenbaum at Toronto in 1996, Jean-Luc Godard bitterly described Jane Campion as a talented filmmaker “completely destroyed by money”. While this was not the first provocative comment of Godard’s, we know how independent film productions can never have enough operating capital, and the sacrifices made for each spare penny. But what happens when a filmmaker accustomed to economical working is offered a vault of Silicon Valley cash, with every visual dream and impractical shot capable of realisation?

Now, in this era of Netflix and Apple “platform” films – where feature-film budgets are inflated to lure potential subscribers, without reliance on box-office returns – we have Steve McQueen’s Blitz [+see also:
trailer
film profile], world-premiering at the BFI London Film Festival. The Academy Award- and Turner Prize-winning filmmaker’s previous film, Occupied City [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], provides a valuable comparison: both explore how London and Amsterdam, respectively, coped against Nazi aggression during World War II, but while the documentary was exacting, pinpoint and minimalist, the fiction feature careens out of control. To make an analogy about artistic aptitude, a great musician is no lesser if they can’t master the tuba as well as the piccolo.

McQueen has flourished in formalist, Bressonian prison dramas (Hunger [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Laura Hastings-Smith Rob…
interview: Steve McQueen
film profile]), primetime broadcast TV (Small Axe) and numerous shorter works showcased in contemporary art spaces; why can’t he be afforded the chance to restage what the country mythologises as one of its finest hours, withstanding the Luftwaffe blitzkrieg between September 1940 and May 1941? He succeeds partially when devising Blitz as a spiritual prequel to Small Axe, observing how London’s black community actually coped and the discrimination it still faced at this triumphalist moment, with suspicion and racial abuse rampant, and slavery and the British Empire celebrated, as one mural in Covent Garden seen by the young protagonist George (Elliott Heffernan) bluntly shows. But countering this honourable pedagogic impulse is pure showmanship: McQueen also immerses us in the aerial bombardments’ fire and fury, seeking catharsis in a triumph over adversity that he guilelessly re-stages, beckoning us to celebrate Britain’s overall World War II victory all over again like many British films of the past. When a burst water main pelts the civilians sheltering in London Bridge Underground station during a nighttime raid, it’s hard to suppress memories of James Cameron’s Titanic, and suddenly, the film feels like merely a display of technical prowess.

The key story thread is overly manipulative as well, with McQueen miscalculating by attempting to make his grand piece of national cinema palatable to all ages. Dramatising a colossal event afflicting masses of the wartime population is a challenge that Hollywood screenwriting revels in, with vast potential dividends; McQueen gets us rooting for Saoirse Ronan’s Rita Hanway (referencing 1940s cinema that way, was “Katharine Holborn” not available?) to reunite with her dear George after he escapes a train he unwillingly boarded that would evacuate him to the countryside. George actually scampers back to London earlier than we’d expect, and gets into several quite implausible scrapes as a would-be Dickensian street urchin.

Narratives centring on small children have been vital for carefully introducing the concept of war to juvenile age groups, and the kids could indeed be transfixed upon family viewings when Blitz is released globally on Apple TV in late November. But for anyone more seasoned, McQueen’s customary scrupulousness and absence of sentimentality, when tackling events of this magnitude, are missed.

Blitz is a production of the UK and the USA, staged by New Regency Productions, Working Title Films, Lammas Park, Walden Media and Apple Studios. Apple TV+ is the global distributor.