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Join Telegram ChannelFar from his conceptual works, Steve McQueen signs his most popular film: a moving journey, at a child's level, through London in the middle of the blitz.
Compelling filmmaker, avant-garde artist, intimidating author of Hungry And 12 Years A SlaveSteve McQueen is also a big kid. More precisely, he is a director who, as he gets older, connects more and more often to his part of childhood.
His thriller The Widows was the adaptation of a series he watched in his youth, Education (last episode of his anthology Small Ax), a self-portrait of the artist in misfit of the school system, and here he is with Blitz sticking to the coattails of a nine-year-old boy lost in London bombed by the Germans. An adventure film for children, as they say, somewhere between Oliver Twist And Hope and Glory.
The film is inspired by the heartbreaking stories of families separated during the Blitz, when the authorities sent 1.25 million Londoners to safety in the countryside, half of them children, without their parents. McQueen, sentimental and sharp at the same time, is in the vein of British patriotic cinema, “keep calm and carry on” atmosphere, while shaking up traditional representations in small touches (the little hero is a mixed race who is going to have an experiment accelerated racism in British society) and by continuing his work on the representation of bodies (powerful visions of corpses frozen in fear).
Most of the great English filmmakers, from Boorman to Nolan, have a World War II film on their CV. Steve McQueen is a big kid, he is also a “Sir” (ennobled by the Queen in 2020). He had to have his own.
Blitz is released in cinemas in France over a weekend, on November 9 and 10, before arriving in streaming on Apple TV+ on November 22