Steve McQueen's Blitz, starring Saoirse Ronan, brings the untold stories of WWII London to life
In Blitz, Irish actor Saoirse Ronan plays a mother in 1940s London attempting to find her son, who was evacuated during air strikes on the city. (Supplied: AppleTV+.)
It might be one of the most dramatised periods in 20th century history, but for Oscar-winning British filmmaker Steve McQueen, there are stories that remain untold amid the chaos and rubble of World War II.
In Blitz, starring Saoirse Ronan and newcomer Elliott Heffernan, the writer-director spins a tale of human endurance, immigrant heroes, and home-grown bigotry — where the old patriotic slogan may as well be "Keep calm and carry on being racist".
In a sense, it's a timely movie for an era in which misplaced nostalgia for the 'good old days' is routinely weaponised by reactionary elements, and the idea of war as a clean-cut fight between good and evil is an illusion of history's selective memory.
It's September 1940, and London is enduring the worst of the Nazi blitzkrieg. German bombers menace the skies, air raid sirens strike fear across the streets, and hordes are scrambling to makeshift shelters or huddled in Underground tunnels. Of the more than a million people evacuated from the city, more than half are kids.
In an interview with Elle, Ronan, 30, noted Blitz was her first time playing a mother: "It felt like a stretch at first". (Supplied: AppleTV+)
Separated from his working-class mother Rita (Ronan, rocking a wavy blitzkrieg bob) and grandfather Gerald (punk/mod legend Paul Weller), nine-year-old George (Heffernan) is put on a train full of kids bound for the safety of the countryside. The train has barely departed when George absconds with a bunch of runaways, embarking on an adventure that will lead him back to London, and — he hopes — a reunion with his family.
What he finds upon returning to the city is a kind of Dickensian nightmare, one in which the locals are as nearly as scary as the Nazi aircraft reigning terror from above. Rita, meanwhile, must navigate a system ill-equipped to find her son, enlisting a local fireman (The Iron Claw's Harris Dickinson) to help.
This is the fifth theatrical feature film from McQueen, the celebrated British contemporary artist who made his debut with the austere prison drama Hunger (2008) and won the Best Picture Oscar for 12 Years a Slave (2013).
Ronan told Deadline that McQueen (right) has a lot of respect for the actors he works with: "It makes you feel like nothing's really off the table". (Supplied: AppleTV+)
While Blitz might seem like just another World War II movie, in a sense it connects directly to McQueen's vibrant BBC series Small Axe (2020), which explored Black culture in London from the 60s to the 80s.
It's a celebration of a rich subculture too often relegated to the shadows of history, of Black jazz joints and big-band nightclubs, and the energy that reverberates decades later in the sound system parties of McQueen's Lover's Rock.
He offers a pre-war flashback to the doomed romance between Rita and George's father, Marcus (CJ Beckford), a Grenadian immigrant who's brutalised by police, and unjustly deported after defending himself against a hate crime.
He paints a stark portrait of racism among a populace struggling to unite against a common enemy, suggesting that what the British were ostensibly fighting against, and what many of its white residents practiced, weren't as far apart as they may have appeared.
There's an especially striking sequence in which George, lost and disorientated, wanders into a London arcade dedicated to the conquests of the British Empire, and the mixed-race boy comes face-to-face with a gallery of artifacts lifted from colonial Africa and India. It's here that he meets Ife (Benjamin Clémentine), a Nigerian-born air raid warden who becomes a sort of surrogate father figure and guide as George reckons with his identity.
McQueen is at his best portraying the resilience of these outsiders, from the West Indian and South Asian volunteers toiling on the home front to the unlikely heroes — like the diminutive orator Mickey Davies (played by Joker's Leigh Gill) — who rouse the embattled rabble.
Writer-director McQueen told Deadline that Blitz started with a photograph he found "of a Black child being evacuated, with a cap and a suitcase". (Supplied: AppleTV+)
As in his adaption of Lynda La Plante's Widows (2018), he's especially attentive to communities formed among women; here, it's Rita and her cohort of munitions factory workers, who rally to advocate for more shelters against the orders of their toady boss. (A great touch: the girls drawing stocking lines on their legs with eyeliner for a night out; the leg-wear famously being subject to rations.)
Blitz is bursting with these kinds of rich details, capturing the bombed-out streets of a city that's been recreated as something between history and dream.
Alongside images of white horses galloping across the ruins and angelic singing groups serenading the shelters, there's a visceral sense of claustrophobia and fear — a surreal world as seen through the eyes of child.
At the same time, McQueen's storytelling instincts aren't always a match for his mastery of mood.
Heffernan (pictured) was cast after a UK-wide open audition process, having only previously appeared in school plays. (Supplied: AppleTV+)
Despite a cracking start, with its runaway kids riding in boxcars and atop steam trains, the movie never becomes the rollicking picaresque it promises, instead settling in for something murkier and, on occasion, just a little bit clunky. The journey's many perils are neatly resolved; its lessons duly, sometimes obviously, imparted.
These elements might have been massaged in the writing, but they don't quite detract from the overall haunting experience, the sensation that we're trapped in an underworld without a moral compass.
And there's something quietly subversive about McQueen smuggling this story of the dispossessed into the stuffy old World War II drama — a genre that, let's face it, appeals to audiences in thrall to a nostalgic, even antiquated view of history. In many ways, this movie is for them.
Blitz is now streaming on Apple TV+.