The world of Clement Virgo’s Steal Away is intentionally nebulous. I spent a good chunk of the first act trying to figure out when and where it was set -the 1950s or the 1980s, in the European countryside or the antebellum south; the guards looking for refugees make no mention of what country they represent and they have vague accents -though the central white family is American, and there are constant references to a ‘north’ that might be safer for people in flight. Only the fact that Cécile (Mallori Johnson), and her family and retinue hail from the Congo is made for certain.
This ambiguity is meant to give the movie a fairy tale-like atmosphere -it’s subtitle is ‘A Tale of Two Princesses’ -in reference to Cécile and Fanny (Angourie Rice) the white teenage daughter of the family safeguarding Cécile, and who is drawn in several ways as a counterpoint sister to. There are moments where the movie really does achieve that sense of mystique, appropriate for the highly allegorical fable. But most of the time Virgo fails to reach those heights and the choice of ambiguity comes across as a mere device to make the movie just a little more perplexing, a little less literal. Or perhaps to distract from its other shortcomings.
Wherever it may be, the film is principally set around an old and wealthy country estate where Cécile, who has fled the Congo with her mother Abigail (Denise M’Baye), is taken in by the generous Florence (Lauren Lee Smith), who has made the home a refuge for various passing immigrants and travelers and is determined to host them as though they were her own family -out of sight of law enforcement cracking down on refugees. Immediately intrigued by Cécile is Florence’s introverted, insecure teenage daughter Fanny, drawn to Cécile’s lively, assertive personality and style -the two forming a sisterly bond that starts wholesome before turning to resentment and envy on Fanny’s part when Cécile begins a romance with the groundskeeper and Fanny’s crush Rufus (Idrissa Sanogo). Though other tensions wait in the wings for them both, emanating from the mysteries around this place and this family.
It is a very suspicious set-up, only made more so by the film’s reticence to a set place and time. Much like in Get Out the presence of a staff of almost exclusively black people rings a few alarm bells, as do the references to others who have passed through the house but who Fanny has not heard from again. The chief perspective shifts pretty consistently between Fanny and Cécile, who are both adrift in this world but in different ways, as well as by some very relatable tenets of adolescence. Though we see a lot more of Fanny’s insecurities and her character faults -including a certain level of unconscious white privilege- than we do anything Cécile, who is framed mostly via spontaneity, passions, and cultural distinctness. It is somewhat interesting the way their relationship and conflict carries over into the realm of sexual maturation, with Fanny’s envy driven as much by Cécile apparently surpassing her in sexual growth as it is in her own pining for Rufus. Predictably she tries to compensate by looking for ways to assert her own sexual being, whether in conversation or action, or otherwise attempting to emanate Cécile in both poise and style -including via a lot of very awkward cultural appropriation in her dress and hair.
Rice plays these unflattering aspects of the character well, not losing the fundamental humanity and sympathy we are meant to feel for her, but Fanny is still a relatively shallow character appropriately comparable to the mean turn of Rice’s character in Mean Girls, an archetype I hope she can move past. Cécile has even less on the page, Johnson playing her with a curious enigmatic tenor suggestive of an almost otherworldly figure due to the movie not until late being particularly interested in her humanity, her anxieties and inhibitions. But the girls have good chemistry, which eventually comes to the fore in a positive way in the last act in some truly sweet and optimistic ways. Both suffer a personal trauma at some point in the story, and for Fanny in particular it would have been extremely easy to be driven by it down a very dark path. Virgo however has her subvert that dramatically.
Which is an important choice for the sake of his metaphor, an otherwise cynical and depressing statement on our social relationship to the history and actors of white supremacy. Fanny is allowed to be a model of allyship though. But of course where in this the movie communicates a very potent theme to white audiences, its messaging to black audiences is more of a mere translation of their collective subjugation and exploitation at the hands of both the overtly sinister, and societal forces that insidiously mask themselves in respect and outreach but are just as harmful. There are echoes of the Tuskegee Experiment and eugenics, the enslavement of black bodily autonomy in relation to sexuality and reproduction. But while there are allusions to agency and especially a rich though vague cultural tapestry, the film expresses little but pain and cultural trauma with regards to the black experience. And as useful as the messaging for whites through Fanny is, it comes with the consequence of some light white saviour implications along its fictitious underground railroad. Virgo seems on some level aware of this, but can't do much without unraveling the story thread beyond asserting Cécile's control in abstract touches that are less prominent.
This really speaks to the problem of his intensely allegorical approach wherein everything and everyone is a symbol or stand-in, and some metaphors are given unintended meaning by the way they demand to be read, rather than as a more harmless component to the story. The world being so vague in its references -melding iconography from many disparate eras of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries- also gives it less tangibility, and therefore the stakes, as vivid as Virgo tries to illustrate them, don’t carry much weight. The fairy tale framing can only give so much cover to this, especially in a movie so otherwise conventionally structured with aspects that are clearly meant to be taken literally. The movie hasn’t the strength to exist on both planes, and Virgo’s choices to lean into the nebulous rather than establish either a real or fantastical concrete setting, might make for a mildly curious experiment, but doesn’t pan out in an organic way.
Virgo has of course covered themes of slavery literally and to great success before in The Book of Negroes. Presenting it via a filter here doesn’t create the same level of immediacy, and apart from a few pulls from other historical regions of black oppression its themes and commentary don’t reveal much of anything. Had it committed to a recognizable time and place the parallels would be more interesting and striking. Steal Away does provide some fascinating material for its actresses and is a halfway decent coming-of-age story at times with at the very least a fairly satisfactory conclusion. But it is too bound up in its ideas and style at the expense of communication to have a solid effect. Certainly not the one its subject matter would demand.
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