DAVID ADAMS watches Sir Steve McQueen’s ‘Blitz’…
Blitz (AU – M/UK – 12A/US-PG-13)
In a word: Unsettling
Set in London during the Blitz of World War II when Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe rained some 12,000 metric tons of bombs on it, Blitz isn’t a typical war film.
While most of the many films about this period tend to focus on the military side of the war or those leading the fight, this film is centred on the civilians caught in its midst. Blitz tells the story of a single mother Rita Hanway (Saoirse Ronan) and her young son George (Elliott Heffernan) who live in Stepney with Rita’s piano-playing father Gerald (Paul Weller).
“Written and directed by Sir Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), Blitz is a confronting film, bringing into very sharp focus the horrors that war brings with it and exploring, through a series of vignettes, the different ways in which people react to it.”
The film opens with Rita bidding farewell to George as he, along with thousands of other children, is evacuated from the capital. But George refuses to say a proper goodbye to his mother, resentful at being forced to leave his home and friends, and their parting is not a happy one.
Rita is soon back at work in a munitions factory, trying to busy herself while worrying over her son. George, meanwhile, decides to jump off the train about an hour out of London and follow the tracks back to the city. We then accompany him on his journey to and then across London where he encounters the saintly – and the very opposite – in his bid to return home. At the same time, we’re given glimpses into his mother’s life as she lives in a city at war (including singing live on the radio during a morale-boosting visit by the BBC to the factory where she works).
Written and directed by Sir Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), Blitz is a confronting film, bringing into very sharp focus the horrors that war brings with it and exploring, through a series of vignettes, the different ways in which people react to it.
And as much as its about the confronting nature of war, Blitz is also about the confronting nature of racism. While George’s mother Rita, is a white woman from the East End, his father, Marcus, was a Black man from Grenada in the West Indies who in a vague reference is said to have been deported.
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The cinematography is impressive and CGI is used to good effect to provide some panoramic views of London while the cast selection, notably Ronan and particularly young star Heffernan, serve the story well (including Benjamin Clémentine as Ife, a kindly air raid warden from Nigeria and Stephen Graham as Albert, leader of a rather horrifying gang of looters). Hans Zimmer, meanwhile, has put together a driving, at times almost overpowering, score which underscores the tension of the times.
It’s a busy film and there’s a sense of it being overstuffed at times but in general the stifling nature of the narrative in which events seem to cascade from one disaster to the next – from one issue to the next – fits with the narrative being told.
It’s an unsettling but impressive movie and timely for both its truth-telling on racism and the devastating impacts of war on those who can do least about it.
Blitz can be seen on Apple TV as well as at selected cinemas.
