Walls come tumbling down: "Blitz"

The new Steve McQueen film on WW2, Blitz, is very different in its methodology from the last Steve McQueen film on WW2, February's naggingly pedantic documentary Occupied City, although there are points of convergence. Once again, we look out on a major European city stalked by the spectre of fascism; once again, the filmmaker's raw material is comprised of everyday homes, streets and lives. Part of McQueen's ongoing project has been to find subtly-to-radically distinct ways of revisiting history and imagery that has become familiar (if not outright tired) over time. Here, he sets out to film London life during wartime in a manner it hasn't been previously, and thereby expand the narrow range and palette of British period drama. It's all there in the prologue, which observes first the convolutions of a firehose being (inadequately) trained on a burning block of East End houses, then cuts to quasi-abstract imagery seemingly viewed from the perspective of either a bomb falling through the sky or a bomber flying over the ocean. Crucially, Blitz is about the perception of difference. Up until this point, most contemporary British WW2 dramas have taken their pallid lead from Ealing or such flagwavers as 1944's This Happy Breed. Both a child and a scholar of empire, McQueen puts a Sikh family in the bomb shelters, installs a Yoruban warden as the conscience of the piece, and seeks eternally to complicate our idea of home. His young hero George (Elliott Heffernan) is a mixed-race evacuee turned escapee, the son of a Guyanan father, liberated by the German aerial assault from the house of love he shares with his white British mother (Saoirse Ronan) and grandfather (Paul Weller; yes, that Paul Weller) and set before a country already riven with internal division. The prejudice he encounters on his return journey strikes the eye and ear as doubly cruel and stinging in the context of a world ablaze. If this is the society our troops are fighting to preserve - one that is casually racist, rather than actively fascist - then what good is any of it? Why shouldn't we let it all burn down?

The primary reference point in McQueen's back catalogue may, in fact, be less Occupied City than 2020's Small Axe: large-scale period drama, made with TV money and an unsparingly critical eye. Blitz unfolds on an even grander scale (the film's panoramic cityscapes have visibly been constructed with streaming TV money rather than terrestrial), yet there's been no let up in authorial rigour and scrutiny. Adam Stockhausen's production design is all the more impressive for having to exist in two states - intact, and in rubble - and this may well stand as the best cast film of 2024, every scene finding faces that present as exact matches for period and part. (Casting director Nina Gold does some of her best work in and around the armaments factory where Ronan the riveter plies her trade: Hayley Squires and Erin Kellyman as fellow workers, Joshua McGuire's foreman exuding bumptious authority beneath a pencil moustache.) With faces like these, McQueen liberates himself from dialogue, and he remains a filmmaker who thinks in indelible images and sequences. So much of Blitz is internalised and felt rather than prescribed: the grandfather's pride as he hears his daughter singing on the radio (music as morale-booster, connecting back to the unforgettable Lovers Rock while also explaining the casting of long-time Red Wedge and Rock Against Racism mainstay Weller); a ghostly, half-glimpsed death on the train tracks; a late visit to a Punch & Judy show during which George is seen to note not the show itself, but the puppeteer's feet. (The comforting illusion of this world, and perhaps something of the magic, has by then been forcibly rubbed off.) Only one previous British filmmaker has come close to thinking about and filming wartime Britain in this particular pictorial fashion, and we'll arrive at him in due course.

What the new film does share with Occupied City - and this is evident long before a member of the Slow Horses ensemble shows up on screen - is the desire to collapse any complacency-inducing distinction between the past and the present, between the Britain of the 1940s and the Britain of today. This London isn't emblematic of some glorious, pre-woke past but an embryonic version of the present: the social schisms (rich/poor, native/migrant), the callous opportunism (Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke do a nimble Dickensian double-act as looters preying on our boy, the dying and the dead), the cold indifference of the powers-that-be. Granted, the wars we're lucky enough to be fighting now are more cultural than physical, and fought chiefly online rather than on the ground beneath our feet. But as McQueen notes and insists, they're premised on the same principles and divisions; they demand we take action, and remain aware of them even as we seek shelter by sitting in cinemas under untroubled roofs and skies. These battles go beyond that against fascism, and extend into every corner of everyday life: when, at the last, the Tube station George himself seeks shelter in is flooded with water, it is as the rains that fell upon Spain the other week, washing away all divisions, and revealing our pettier struggles as but a drop in the ocean. With its 12A rating and Working Title logo, there is some superficial truth in the widespread critical assertion that Blitz represents McQueen at his most conventional: it's the one film of this director you can well envisage your mum and dad getting wrapped up in, were they to resist the emblandishments of the Paddington threequel. But it's also demonstrably the work of a politically conscious artist trying to broaden the horizons of the mass audience - to move us, at long last, beyond Downton and its attendant bunting. The highest praise I can bestow on Blitz, and this is finally a film that commands the highest praise, is that it's the kind of sublimely textured, ever-pointed, deeply moving popular entertainment you can imagine the late Terence Davies adoring - and perhaps being jealous he wasn't able to make in his lifetime.

Blitz is now showing in selected cinemas.