London Film Festival Diaries - Day 1
Steve McQueen goes mediocre and an African voice continues to sing.
The London Film Festival (LFF) is running from October 9 - 20, and I will be among the plebs attending the regular screenings. The days of me going to press screenings and getting paid to attend festivals are behind me (for now?) but I won’t let that stop me from sharing my thoughts here. Immediate impressions will be on X if you’d like to give me a follow there.
Blitz - dir. Steve McQueen
The Plot in a Nutshell
The story of the 1940-41 Blitz during WW2 from the perspective of the average Londoner, as told and experienced through the eyes of nine-year-old George (Elliott Heffernan) and his mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) after they’re separated.
With mere fragments of the artistry of Hunger (2008), Shame (2012) and 12 Years A Slave (2013) barely present, Steve McQueen’s magic is hardly recognisable in what feels like a paycheck project without much passion.
It’s a WW2 story that feels at times desperate to pull at the heartstrings and with George as the only properly fleshed out character, the pulls feel all the more contrived. Ronan is reliably excellent, but doesn’t have much of a script to work with, and Heffernan has the screen presence but not the acting chops to bear the heavy weight of carrying the film on his young shoulders.
The greatest scene is the very first one, when a fire hose becomes an uncontrollable serpentine monster that’s equally dark and beautiful to behold. Other than a handful of moments (one surprising and sudden death in particular), this opening is the only time we get a glimpse of the McQueen of arthouse old. Alas it all goes downhill from there. Music plays a massive role — Blitz is basically a musical that’s not a Musical — but with lyrics as inspired as “my winter coat is…you” it falls quite short in this department.
The ominous cruelty of the Blitz itself is captured effectively enough, with the shots of the bombs and planes being some of the best in the film, and the two cameo thieves played by Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke are a pair of decadent delights who deserve their own movie. However, by cranking up the sentimentality volume to a deafening maximum and opting for convention and predictability over creativity and daring, McQueen has gone full mainstream resulting in perhaps his weakest film yet.
On Becoming A Guinea Fowl - dir. Rungano Nyoni
Plot in a Nutshell
When Shula (Susan Chardy) discovers her uncle Fred’s lifeless body on the road, she feels nothing. As the funeral preparations unfold, she and her cousins go through the grieving process in their own way, as hidden secrets about their middle-class Zambian family slowly bubble up to the surface.
Rungano Nyoni’s Zambian family drama is refreshingly unconventional, which was most welcome after the disappointingly conventional Blitz, but still not an easy watch. The narrative pendulum swings scene to scene from dynamic to flat pretty wildly. In one moment you’re in stitches laughing and compelled by the remarkable balance of tragedy and comedy, in another you’re searching for some sense of conflict to cling on to in between yawns.
Lucrecia Dalt’s mood-moulding music, with its deep contrabass rhythms, is the clear MVP for me; the way Nyoni uses it is chef’s kiss. Even the most innocuous of scenes instantly begin to drip with ominous dread as soon as the score kicks in. I also can’t believe that this is Susan Chardy’s first ever film - she has a naturally commanding presence and portrays Shuni like a craft veteran in what is a very difficult role to pull off.
All in all, Guinea Fowl is at its best when it’s blending humor and absurdity into its tale of tragedy, and it could’ve used some more of that, but there’s a lot here regardless. Not least a unique spin on how the gravitational pull of trauma, grief and abuse can draw a family into an emotional storm. You’ll also walk away with mixed feelings about Zambian traditions, but at least feeling like you’ve learned something new about a culture that doesn’t get nearly enough cinematic love as it should.