MOVIES

Film review: Blitz

LFF 2024 World premiere

Director Steve McQueen told us at the press conference for his new film Blitz that he has been blessed to be able to open his films at festivals in Cannes, Venice,Toronto and Telluride but for this film there was only one place he wanted to debut it and that was London where the film is set. He pointed out that outside the venue where the film would premiere that evening, the Royal festival Hall, there had been a large explosion during the war ,although the hall, itself did not exist at the time.

Film Friday: Blitz. LFF 2024

By Rehna

Steve Mcqueen’s recreation of wartime London, in 1940, is impeccable, meticulously detailed and, at times, simply beautiful. In particular, his focus is the East End, both as an area and its community. The film opens with a blazing inferno in Stepney Green and then segues calmly into the small front room of terraced home where a straight backed, white haired man in a waistcoat and pinstripe trousers is playing the piano bidding to maintain some sense of normality in a world turned upside down. The man is Paul Weller, yes the Modfather himself, here, Gerald, father to Rita Hanway (Saoirse Ronan), a single mother to a mixed race boy, George (Elliott Heffernan) who are asleep upstairs.

The evocation of the era is superbly rendered in these two opening scenes. Later, the sight of a steam train snaking its way puffily through the lush English countryside is as visually breathtaking as the scene where two young women going out for the night draw black lines on the back of their bare legs to look like the seams of stockings, is heartbreakingly funny. The juxtaposition of the grand and the small, the national and the local and intimate is expertly handled by McQueen. He takes the traditional narratives of this period and the people, lulls you into the comfort of recognition and then slyly adds what the Saturday afternoon television wartime films never showed. All this, when it works, is nicely satisfying.

However, the film is marred by a disjointed story that plays like a series of unconnected scenes, weak characters, banal dialogue and relationships that don’t convince. The film doesn’t know whether it wants to be a family drama, a war epic, a coming of age tale, an adventure/survival story or an identity politics lecture for a sixth form full of kids who think throwing paint over art masterpieces is fighting oppression. At one points it even veers into a Faginesque Oliver Twist homage. Crazily, this probably the best part of the film, delving all too briefly as it does, into the unreported, grotesque underbelly of the stiff upper lipped generation of lore.

In addition, Blitz tackles other topics not widely associated with this time, such as racism, class inequality, the treatment of women and this is interesting in the genre but it does so with a 2024 sensibility which takes you out of the period as do the scenes and bits of dialogue which just seem highly implausible for the era.

Good actors like Stephen Graham, Kathy Burke and Harris Dickinson are underused and even the normally excellent Saoirse Ronan, as the central Rita, seems to move disconnectedly through a series of situations as if she’s viewing them rather than as the compelling beating heart of an engrossing story that flows through and around her.

Overall, the film looks spectacular, tackles subjects that have not even been touched upon in conventional wartime films, is clearly a meticulously researched work but it explodes as an impressive firework rather than an emotionally unforgettable blitz.

3/5