Walls come tumbling down: "Blitz"

Steve McQueen's new World War II film, Blitz 2024, is very different in methodology from Steve McQueen's last World War II film, the thoroughly pedantic documentary Occupied City, released in February, but there are similarities too. Once again, we look at a European metropolis haunted by the specter of fascism. Once again, the filmmaker's raw material consists of everyday homes, streets, and lives. Part of McQueen's ongoing project is to find subtly, or radically different, ways of revisiting history and images that have become familiar (if not outright banal) over time. Here he has set out to film wartime London life in a way that has never been done before, expanding the narrow scope and palette of the British period drama. All of this is seen in the prologue, which first shows a coil of a fire hose being aimed at a burning East End block, then switches to a quasi-abstract image that appears to be from the perspective of a bomb falling from the sky, or a bomber flying over the sea. 

The point is that Blitz is about the recognition of otherness. So far, most contemporary British WWII dramas have taken pale inspiration from masterpieces like Ealing and 1944's This Happy Breed. McQueen, a child and empire enthusiast, constantly tries to complicate our notions of home, disappearing a Sikh family into a bomb shelter and installing a Yoruba warden as the play's conscience. His young protagonist George is a mixed race evacuee-turned-refugee, the son of a Guyanese man liberated by a German bombing raid from the loving home he shares with his white British mother and grandfather (Paul Weller, yes, that Paul). Weller both sympathizes with and confronts a country already torn apart by internal divisions. The prejudices he encounters on his way home seem doubly cruel in the context of a world in flames, piercing both the eye and the ear. If this is the society our troops are fighting to preserve—a society that’s more casually racist than aggressively fascist—what good is it? Why not just burn it all down?

The most important reference point in McQueen’s catalogue to date is probably Occupied City, rather than 2020’s Small Axe. This is a big-budget period piece made with TV money and a brutal critical eye. Blitz takes place on an even grander scale, but the precision and control of the writing is undiminished. Adam Stockhausen’s production design is all the more impressive because it must exist in two states: intact and in ruins, and every scene has a face that matches the era and fits the role precisely, enough to make it worthy of the best-cast movie of 2024. (Casting director Nina Gold does some of her best work in and around the defense plant where Ronan the Riveter plies his trade. You can stream the film on Afdah Movies.