The term ‘the Blitz spirit’ gets bandied about a lot in the UK. It’s become a handy, often jokey shorthand for Brits’ doughtiness in the face of everything from terrorist attacks to a sudden shortage of crisps. Eighty years on, we still wear that ‘keep calm and carry on’ badge with pride.
Should we, though? Steve McQueen’s (Occupied City) anthemic film is in fiery conversation with those untouchable legends of Britain’s early war years. It suggests that German bombs rained down on a London (and other British cities) that wasn’t exactly the united, anti-Nazi bastion of stiff upper lips and solidarity of lore. Instead, Blitz shows a place rife with social and racial division, where prejudice is just another kind of shrapnel for Black Londoners to dodge.
For that reason, and a few others, it’s not a comfortable watch. And it’s definitely not The Railway Children redux, despite some superficial similarities in its story of a young train-bound city dweller absconding and striking out for his East End home.
That boy is steely nine-year-old George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan), the biracial son of Saoirse Ronan’s munitions worker Rita. His dad’s roots and fate are revealed much later in the story. Paul Weller, gently low-key in his belated screen debut, is grandpa Gerald, a piano-tinkling presence in their Stepney terraced house.
This is definitely not The Railway Children redux
Luftwaffe bombers, shadowy silhouettes in the night sky, are the film’s deus ex machina. But Blitz never shows the bombs landing; instead, and occasionally using flickering modernist visuals, McQueen infuses the whole film with a creeping anxiety coded by time: daylight is safe(ish); nighttime is pure peril. People are alive; then they’re not.
In Heffernan and Ronan, Blitz has two ferociously spirited presences at its heart, even if a subplot involving Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke’s bombsite scavengers feels a little Dickens-lite.
Blessed with Apple TV’s budgets, the Londoner works on a much bigger canvas than your average World War II drama. There are blazing infernos, collapsing timbers, shaking bomb shelters, sudden Underground floods. The opening scene has a fire warden’s suddenly unmanned hose flaying violently like some kind of demonic serpent as fires rage around. One macabre scene sees West End nightclubbers reduced to lifeless mannequins by a German bomb, propped in front of their champagne coupes. ‘Their lungs burst,’ is a bystander’s blunt summary.
There’s the matter-of-factness of Humphrey Jennings’s wartime documentaries – Fires Were Started, London Can Take It! – and the straining grandeur of Joe Wright’s Atonement here. But it’s when Blitz steers away from the wartime clichés of snooty BBC broadcasts and morale-lifting sing-songs and shows the darker side of the Blitz that it really hits hard. Its curiosity is its strongest suit, as McQueen’s script lays bare divisions that see working-class families barred from taking shelter in Tube stations, socialism taking root underground, and racism rife.
McQueen isn’t questioning the courage or endurance of the city and its people through these brutal days. But he is probing our relationship with this over-lionised period of our history, though, and finding it hopelessly romanticised.
Maybe it’s time, his flawed but hard-hitting film suggests, to lift the curfew on looking it afresh.
Blitz had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival. It’s in cinemas Nov 1 and streaming on Apple TV+ Nov 22.