Movies

Queen & Slim review – love on the run across the US racial divide


This arresting debut feature from Melina Matsoukas – Grammy-award winning director of Beyoncé’s Formation video, whose television CV includes Master of None and Insecure – puts new twists on familiar outlaw riffs that can be traced back through Badlands and Bonnie and Clyde to À bout de souffle and beyond. Boasting outstandingly empathic performances from dynamite screen presence Daniel Kaluuya (Oscar-nominated for Get Out) and rising star Jodie Turner-Smith, in a career-making first feature lead, it’s an intoxicatingly lawless lovers-on-the-run romance played out against the politically charged backdrop of racially divided modern America.

Shot in a dreamy natural light by Tat Radcliffe, who did such remarkable work on French-Algerian director Yann Demange’s Belfast-set ’71, and sensuously scored by Devonté Hynes (aka Blood Orange), Queen & Slim immerses its audience in an unfolding road-movie fable. While Lena Waithe’s script (on which author/producer James Frey shares a story credit) may veer occasionally into narrative contrivance, there’s an emotional honesty to the central love story that rings true despite the odd note of implausibility – a sense of powerful, magical potential that burns out any first-feature flaws.

We meet first meet Kaluuya and Turner-Smith’s titular characters in a Cleveland diner, on a first date that looks like it might not have a follow-up. He’s a law-abiding citizen whose worst trait is being a noisy eater – the kind of hard-working, non-drinking everyman you could easily lose in a crowd; she’s a criminal defence lawyer, practising in a state that still has the death penalty, and in which the colour of a suspect’s skin can hold more sway than hard evidence. Driving home, the pair are pulled over by a white cop who sees red and pulls his gun, with catastrophic consequences. In an instant, they become fugitives – what Turner-Smith calls “accidental activists” – whose plight will strike a chord with news-watchers on both sides of the political divide.

Fuelled by half-formed hopes of making it to Cuba, they head for New Orleans, where “Uncle Earl” (the reliably magnetic Bokeem Woodbine) offers fleeting refuge from the closing net of police capture. Yet despite the price on their heads, “Queen” and “Slim” (several characters remain unnamed) soon discover that they have a network of supporters who function like a modern underground railroad, aiding them on a quest that inverts the historical odyssey recently explored in Kasi Lemmons’s Harriet, travelling from the metropolitan north to the coastal south in search of freedom. As they move, so their legend grows – a romanticised tale of supposed avenging angels that will inspire random acts of love and violence, as chaotic as the events of that first roadside encounter.

Bokeem Woodbine and Indya Moore in Queen and Slim.



Bokeem Woodbine and Indya Moore in Queen & Slim. Photograph: Universal Pictures/AP

While specific reference is made to the counterculture pin-ups immortalised in Arthur Penn’s era-defining 60s hit Bonnie & Clyde, Queen & Slim arguably has more in common with films such as the Hughes Brothers’ still-undervalued Dead Presidents or, more recently, Céline Sciamma’s Bande de Filles/Girlhood – both tales of young black characters struggling to find their place and claim their names in inherently hostile environments. Speaking to my colleague Simran Hans in a recent interview, Matsoukas spoke of police brutality as a “black issue” that transcended national boundaries, and cited the case of African-American 12-year-old Tamir Rice being “gunned down by a racist police officer” in Cleveland as crucial to her film’s geographical narrative.

Yet in its most overtly provocative scene, Queen & Slim jarringly intercuts acts of love and death in a manner that seems specifically designed to separate our antiheroes from the inadvertent inspirational consequences of their misadventures. It’s a moment that simultaneously bifurcates and intertwines the twin threads of universal romance and sociopolitical tragedy that run in tandem throughout the picture.

If that makes Queen & Slim sound more like a treatise than a treat, think again. It’s a terrifically tactile film, full of the kind of deliciously observed detail that lingers in the mind long after the movie has finished. Watching the central characters metamorphose into the iconic figures emblazoned on the publicity images for the film is every bit as fantastical as witnessing the super-hero transformations of Marvel’s mega-budget Black Panther, in which Kaluuya memorably played W’Kabi. The fact that the image is itself a construct – a role-playing snapshot that inadvertently becomes a call to arms – is just one of the many sinewy themes with which Waithe’s script wrestles. Yet in the end it’s the love story that makes the film matter, conjured with enough electricity to allow the polemics of the head to be swept along by the passions of the heart, in suitably breathless fashion.

Watch a trailer for Queen& Slim.



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