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| Elliott Heffernan and Saiorse Ronan in Steve McQueen's Blitz. (Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Apple TV+.) |
Steve McQueen’s film
Blitz, set in September 1940, in the early days of Hitler’s incessant bombing of London, is an obvious labor of love. It takes place over just a couple of days, during which Rita (Saiorse Ronan), an armaments factory worker, puts her nine-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan), on a train bound for the countryside with other children but he jumps out and tries to make his way back to Stepney, the working-class neighborhood where he lives with Rita and her father (Paul Weller); he never knew his father, who is African and was deported unjustly after a street fight. Production designer Adam Stockhausen’s recreations of the period are gorgeous, as is the cinematography by Yorick Le Soux, the favorite collaborator of the French director Olivier Assayas. The editing by Peter Sciberras is masterful: it actualizes McQueen’s remarkable sense of rhythm, which was showcased in his
Small Axe series and especially in
Lovers Rock. The film is propelled forward, moving back and forth between Rita and her wayward boy with remarkable fluidity and from one London location to another so that the continuity is simultaneously whole-cloth and fragmented. It contains a number of beautifully constructed setpieces that rank with the finest work that has been done with this period in film. And along the way McQueen takes care to pay homage to some of its predecessors:
Hope and Glory,
Empire of the Sun,
Saving Private Ryan,
Atonement. (There’s also a subplot out of
Oliver Twist and a speech in an underground shelter by a left-wing character, played by Leigh Gill, who seems to have been inspired by Agate in Clifford Odets’s
Waiting for Lefty.)
