Skip to main content

Queen & Slim Updates the Outlaw Couple Film in a Timely, Powerful Way


Variations on the Bonnie and Clyde story are about as old as Bonnie and Clyde themselves; within less than two decades of the infamous couples’ crime spree, film noirs like They Live By Night and Gun Crazy were exploiting the romantic crime couple as a cinematic subgenre. Of course it gained exceptional renewed popularity with Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, not only ushering in the New Hollywood era, but becoming a rallying cry for a series of imitators trying to capture a degree of that films’ magic. Some are quite good, like Terence Malick’s debut, Badlands; others are lacking, like Spielberg’s early movie The Sugarland Express or Scorsese’s, Boxcar Bertha. But the greatest has to be Thelma & Louise, which I caught in a screening earlier this year, for a number of reasons but principally for its’ feminist twist on the material.
Queen & Slim, the debut feature from music video director Melina Matsoukas, offers a similar play on the story: what if Bonnie and Clyde were black? And what if their crime was simply an act of self-defence that they knew they would be unfairly prosecuted for? This is what happens to the title characters of Queen & Slim, played terrifically by Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya and never referred to by those or any other names for the duration of the film. Pulled over for the flimsiest of pretenses following a blind date, a police officer makes increasingly ludicrous demands of them before shooting Queen (an attorney threatening to record the scene) in the leg and subsequently being fatally shot by Slim during a struggle. From here the film follows the fugitives across state lines (they started in Ohio) and in various cars with the ultimate goal of escaping to Cuba.
The movie draws attention to the namelessness of its protagonists, hiding their identities in news broadcasts, working around name-specific dialogue, and cutting off lines about to reveal them –screenwriter Lena Waithe is determined these characters have that symbolic universality, that they stand in in some way for young black people across the United States and represent the public and media’s impersonal relationship to stories of police injustice against African-Americans. It’s an interesting narrative choice, and one that is effective without reducing the characters to archetypes. Queen and Slim have personalities: she’s level-headed, intelligent, and strong-willed in spite of a traumatic past, he’s anxious and spiritual, but with a charming sense of humour. They are a couple whose differences are glaring, before all went down there likely wouldn’t have been a second date, but they complement each other in ways that are essential to their survival as a unit. Turner-Smith and Kaluuya have excellent chemistry that grows more apparent as their relationship blossoms and their characters influence each other –Queen becoming more impulsive and liberated while Slim attains new courage and confidence. In contrast to Bonnie and Clyde and many of their descendants, not only are Queen and Slim not criminals, but they are fundamentally good people.
There is a backstory that throws some grey into that distinction of Queen though that isn’t strictly necessary for her character, except to provide her with a particularly unique family demon. And indeed the movie is weaker when it delves into specifics of its protagonists’ lives, lessening that intended ubiquity a tad. The film also mixes its message during an ill-thought out riot sequence that seems to take the side of the cops-as-victims narrative ultimately leading to an action that undercuts the films’ thesis. What’s more is that this demonstration of violence is cut against a sex scene with clear metaphorical ambition, but with such severity that both scenes are more jarring than genuinely evocative. The movie is a little rough in terms of plot structure too; as much as the reasoning for the pairs’ going on the run checks out, it still comes across as too quick and too drastic a decision, especially given Queen’s established rationality.
These weaknesses mostly pale however in light of how exquisite the film itself is. Shot by Tat Radcliffe in a raw, desaturated grade and with deep lighting choices, the film looks vividly sharp yet natural in a manner that almost resembles Moonlight, grounding the story while also highlighting its soulful romanticism. The tone meanders between tense and hopeful, frightening and joyful, touching every sensation to come from such an odyssey and which Matsoukas gracefully harmonizes into a beauteous whole. Her music video background gives her a rich understanding and stylistic intuition in how she composes and conveys romantic and significant character beats with admirable subtlety and passion. And Devonte Hynes’ score adds to the poetic atmosphere. Waithes’ narrative remains provocative and pointed though, the movies’ underlying focus being directed at race-based police brutality and the systematic way it harms peoples’ lives and undermines any trust in authority. At a few points in the film, Queen and Slim marginally escape the police (though refreshingly without the conventional action sequence or car chase). And yet that threat is a constant, no better illustrated than in the movies’ ending. Waithe wants to incite an aggravated emotional response, and here is where she undoubtedly does it, powerfully hammering home her message without ambiguity or pretense.
Bokeem Woodbine, playing a pimp relative of Queen, straight up calls the pair “the black Bonnie and Clyde” at one point. It’s an association the film is making no efforts to hide.  But in boasting this reference openly, Queen & Slim is also subverting it, and denouncing the gleeful rebelliousness and white privilege baked into it and other such stories. A modern day Bonnie and Clyde, the film posits, not only wouldn’t be white, but would be victims of an unfair system designed to punish them without recourse –to the point becoming outlaws is a necessity more than a choice. And given all we’ve seen as the 2010s come to a close, it’s hard to argue the accuracy of that assessment. 

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
1 comment
Read more

Back to the Feature: New York, New York (1977)

New York, New York  is a two hour forty minute musical movie largely about a toxic relationship and I understand why it was Martin Scorsese’s first big flop. Some have blamed its poor reception on the kind of movie it was, of a style and tone Scorsese wasn’t known for, but I find that hard to believe. Even after only five films, he’d proven himself an extremely versatile director, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore  found an audience. Sure this jazz musical love letter to New York City was following up Taxi Driver and its’ far more cynical take on the city, but then it’s also ‘from the director of Taxi Driver ’ which itself was a big hit. Was it a matter of public appetite for musicals, or mere word of mouth and early critical reception that dissuaded viewers? Irrespective of that, I was stunned to discover this movie was the origin of the titular song, which I’d assumed was much older (it’s definitely got the sound of something that might have come out of the Jazz sce...
Post a Comment
Read more