Blitz (PG)
Verdict: An explosive start
This year’s London Film Festival could not have had a more appropriate curtain-raiser last night than Blitz, a stirring drama set in September 1940, just after the Luftwaffe began its intense eight-month bombing campaign on the city.
It felt downright eerie to leave the cinema on London’s Southbank and see, across the Thames, the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral – once the city’s structural symbol of resistance against Hitler.
Working-class Londoners, of course, have always been a human symbol of resistance in World War II, depicted over and over on screen as the epitome of doughty, selfless pluck.
But in Blitz, writer-director Sir Steve McQueen is not afraid to blow up that time-honoured image.
McQueen’s focus is an East End family of three. Single mum Rita (Saoirse Ronan, left) shares a terraced house with her nine-year-old son George (centre), and her dad Gerald (played by musician Paul Weller in his screen-acting debut)
Blitz opens in cinemas on November 1. The film opens spectacularly with a fireman being knocked senseless by an out-of-control hose, and later there’s a brilliantly orchestrated scene in which a Tube station is flooded
Some of the characters in this enjoyably absorbing film have distilled the cherished Blitz spirit into something sour. For instance, while everyone else is rolling out the barrel, there’s a criminal gang at work, stripping the dead of their jewels.
McQueen’s focus is an East End family of three. Single mum Rita (Saoirse Ronan) shares a terraced house with her nine-year-old son George (impressive newcomer Elliott Heffernan), and her dad Gerald (played by musician Paul Weller in his screen-acting debut).
The boy is mixed-race, the product of Rita’s relationship with a West Indian man, who has since been deported.
McQueen, whose own parents also came from the West Indies, was by all accounts inspired to create this yarn by a single wartime photograph of a young black evacuee.
Race and racism duly loom large. But, in essence, it’s an old-fashioned adventure story about a spirited kid who is furious when his devoted mother reluctantly decides that he must be evacuated and isn’t convinced by her hollow rhapsodies about the countryside. ‘Cows and horses smell,’ he says.
Blitz is a drama set in September 1940, just after the Luftwaffe began its intense eight-month bombing campaign on the city
The aftermath of the bombing of the Cafe de Paris (which actually happened in March 1941) is meticulously re-created in the film
A little later he jumps off the train whisking him to safety and embarks on his arduous odyssey home.
Blitz is a chronicle of that return trip, which predictably, for dramatic purposes, is fraught with peril.
Nonetheless, McQueen still smartly subverts our expectations, evoking The Railway Children (1970) when George jumps aboard another train and befriends three young brothers who have done the same thing – only for tragedy to bring our own sentimental journey to a screeching halt.
There are plainly deliberate echoes of Oliver Twist, too, when George is introduced by a kind of Nancy figure to this story’s version of Bill Sikes, played by Stephen Graham, with Kathy Burke as his grotesquely-painted partner-in-crime.
One presumes their gang of thieves has a basis in reality.
Throughout, McQueen deftly weaves fact with fiction.
Saoirse Ronan attends the "Blitz" World Premiere during the Opening Night Gala of the 68th BFI London Film Festival at The Royal Festival Hall today
The aftermath of the bombing of the Cafe de Paris (which actually happened in March 1941) is meticulously re-created, and there really was a noisy campaign by Londoners to be allowed to shelter in Tube stations, which brings me neatly to Paul ‘Going Underground’ Weller.
The so-called ‘Modfather’ is boldly but perfectly cast as a wartime East End grandfather – and looks exactly as if he might be Ronan’s old dad.
She’s wonderful too, as she always is, as a mother at her wits’ end with worry.
But it’s Heffernan on whom the credibility of the story rests, and his young shoulders carry the burden comfortably.
The other thing that McQueen has to get right –and does – is the particular tumult and trauma of the London Blitz.
The film opens spectacularly with a fireman being knocked senseless by an out-of-control hose, and later there’s a brilliantly orchestrated scene in which a Tube station is flooded.
I had only one real niggle: while sheltering from the bombs, a Nigerian ARP warden called Ife (Benjamin Clementine), apparently based on a real person, makes a speech about tolerance to a small gathering conveniently comprising a Sikh, a Jew and a white bigot, who has pegged up a bedsheet as a means of segregation.
It’s a wincingly confected episode, which comes far too obviously from a screenwriter’s keyboard, and is emblematic of McQueen’s more general and rather surprising failure to get prejudice quite right.
There are some horrid racists in his story and everyone else is entirely colourblind, but society doesn’t work like that now, and I’m sure it was even more nuanced in 1940.
That aside, he has made a fine picture, which has got the 68th London Film Festival off to a thunderous start. Blitz opens in cinemas on November 1.