LONDON BLITZ REIMAGINED

MCQUEEN RAISES ART LIKE LAZARETH FROM THE FIRE STORMS OF THE BLITZ

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The world has heard the horrific war story before, but like Londoners, who felt the bombs drop night after night for eight months, the story of the Blitz gets told over and over again.

Director Steve McQueen introduces the chaos of the fire storms before the camera finds the leading characters and the narrative tract.

This historical drama dramatizes the true stories of the Blitz during World War II when Adolf Hitler’s Germany attempted to conquer the Island of Great Britain just as they had swept through Europe with lightening aerial bombardment.

McQueen develops the mother and son relationship just before George is sent, for his own safety, into the countryside with the other children of London.

Saoirise Ronan reinvents herself again, this time as George’s mother, Rita, deeply connected with him, so much so she only sends him away at the last minute, on the last train from London into the countryside.

The narrative has this Disneyesque quality as George, played by Elliott Hefferman, does not want to leave his mother in London, and instead escapes the very first chance he gets.

George is a mature 9 year old, but his part in the film has this enigmatic charm that resembles one part coming of age film and one part Peter Pan adventure fantasy.

McQueen splits the narrative in two, with one part continuing on in London, as Rita finds her role in the war effort, first as a machinist in a bomb factory and then in a bomb shelter as a first aid attendant.

The story initially seems to be about Rita and Saoirise Ronan’s performance in a leading role – like just how good of an actor has the four time Academy Award nominee become. Rita is distraught but finds valuable things to do with her time.

McQueen highlights Ronan with a bit of extra light as she mingles in dark sets with blonde hair and a light complexion.

The camera follows George for a bit on the train and then goes back to Rita in London. But then George decides to turn around and go back to the love of his mother’s arms. And the camera begins to mainly follow George on that journey, with Rita becoming more and more the backstory, but ever in the young boy’s thoughts.

The narrative recurringly returns to London to remind everyone of the horrors of the Blitz and how the community was so desperate to survive. But George also has one frightful experience after another on his return journey in a parallel narrative.

McQueen seems to have seamlessly compiled together a series of psychotropic experiences for the narrative, like recurring childhood nightmares telling different parts of a horrific true story learnt in bits and pieces from neighbourhood friends and during very serious debriefings around the family dinner table.

Several of the adventures George finds himself on are independent truths of the Blitz, like the looting of shops and macabre robbing of the dead, and the flooding of the Balham subway station. And London Authorities did reluctantly open up the underground subway system for people to use as bomb shelters.

Everything else has this surreal anonymity like in childhood nightmares in which people and events seem familiar, but not likely, and the young mind is thankfully woken up, although by something more horrific than being trapped in a dreamscape.

And a dull camera lens often provides that aesthetic of seeing, while asleep, through the fantastical childhood imagination.

McQueen uses the Jungian archetypes for mother to drive the subplot, while the Jungian trickster is used as the main narrative device.

While many anonymous Londoners fearing imminent death are driven by instinctual survival impulses, George has an all-knowing omniscience that only children and filmmakers have (after having finished all the story boards) of being convinced of him returning to be with his mother as being the correct choice.

Elliot Heffernan, as the trickster, knows he should be with his mother and he also knows that he should not be discriminated against.

The Balham subway station flooding becomes the deluge myth. And George survives as the hero, waking up in the comfort of a volunteer’s home, like Peter Pan finding himself safe back in Kensington Gardens after escaping the pirates in Neverland.

McQueen weaves London’s racial politics into the script, with several scenes involving discussions about equality and racial harmony, usually after the camera confronts racial bigotry in some form. George is mixed race after his mother Rita had a relationship with a black man she met at a London Jazz club.

The script constantly dances back and forth from tranquil moments to traumatically interrupting frightful events. This contrast of scene sequences inevitable becomes an emotive device that is driven even deeper by an original music score.

Composer Hanz Zimmer compels the narrative beyond what words can accomplish, further than anything that can be rationalized, and into scenes that emote pure emotional responses.

Stephen Graham has a role in the film’s reversal scenes as a Dickensian leader of a group of looters and corpse robbers that enlist George to squeeze in between burnt timbers of bombed out jewelry stores and nightclubs in search of preowned treasure. The macabre scene sequences show just how fragile humanity can become under the pressure of the life and death struggles that the Blitz brought to London.

The childhood influences of fantastical stories and nightmarish dreamscapes edits well together because of a heavy layer of camera angles and film aesthetics. McQueen has spent a lot of creative energy seamlessly advancing the scenes underneath the telling of a deeply disturbing human tragedy.

One scene advance takes the interpretation of the true events from abstract dots to the moonlit waves of the English Channel as seen below from the perspective of the German bomber pilots.

Blitz is an aesthetically pleasing and emotionally compelling film perfected within a 2 hr runtime by stylizing every scene within a brief storyline that occurs over perhaps 48 frightful hours of a young boy’s life.