Dir: Steve McQueen | Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Paul Weller, Elliot Heffernan | UK Drama 2024
Blitz Steve McQueen’s Blitz opens with powerful emotional scenes of mother love set against the carnage of the bombing of London during the blitz of WW2. The ‘blitz’ of London and other parts of England by Nazi Germany killed over forty three thousand people and damaged two million houses during a short but intense blitz during 1940/1941 – although for McQueen this serve as background to foreground personal stories of various characters impacted by the upheaval of war.
Saoirse Ronan is a mother living with her father (Paul Weller) and mixed-race child (Elliot Heffernan) on a Stepney Green council estate in London’s East End. Many of these sequences, held together by a lyrical fast moving camera ducking and diving with sharp editing, build up vivid scenes of families living together, the women working in ammunition factories with life constantly interrupted by sirens prefiguring bombs forcing evacuation into underground train stations.
As the film progresses it shifts tone with the child’s evacuation into the countryside. This upheaval of the mother/son relationship allows McQueen to explore well-known interests including the importance of popular music as barometers of cultural identity.
There are a number of powerful sequences about racism involving black and marginal communities as they were in England during this of time. The film also provides a mixed bag of sequences that veer between Dickens’ Oliver Twist with a glimmer of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress as the boy navigates his dangerous journey through London, encountering a range of grotesque old school vaudeville villains played by Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke. The film brings back memories of Children Film Foundation films of the 1970s with children pitted against often adult social problems, and a sequence of child abuse exploitation recalling Freda Jackson as a menacing cruel wartime landlady in Daniel Birt’s No Room at the Inn (1948).
The trouble here is that it is difficult to decide whether McQueen is playing these scenes with sense and sensibility – or sentimentality. The skill with his actors is undeniable, as is his visual storytelling with intriguing moments that recall Mc Queens original gallery installation period. This includes a visual reference to Dead Pan 1997 where McQueen stands avoiding a collapsing wall, as well as static screen shots of light and bombs creating textured wallpaper patterns.
At its best, Blitz recalls another film about the loss of childhood viewed through adult eyes. This is Alexander McKendrick’s thoughtful journey film Sammy Going South (1964) about a boy travelling across Africa during the 1956 Suez crisis in a picturesque journey where he is reunited with a remotely-remembered Aunt. Unfortunately, McQueen’s content is less controlled than McKendrick’s and by the time it reaches its final redemption scene of mother and child love, Blitz feels more mannered than moving. Peter Herbert
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LONDON FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW 2024 | In UK Cinemas November 2024