Melina Matsoukas (2019)
Their real names are Angela Johnson and E(a)rnest[1] Hines, although that isn’t revealed until the end of Melina Matsoukas’s romantic drama, which is also a politically charged road movie. Even their nicknames, which give the film its title, are rarely heard in the course of the film. In the opening scene, Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith) and Slim (Daniel Kaluuya) are meeting for the first time, courtesy of an online dating service. They’re having a meal, and a somewhat halting conversation, in a diner in Cleveland, Ohio. She is a criminal defence lawyer. I didn’t pick up whether Slim had a job but he’s quiet and unassuming, compared with his combatively articulate, highly-strung date. As Slim is driving Queen home, his car swerves – slightly but enough to attract the attention of a police car, which pulls them over. As soon as he sees they’re black, the white police officer concerned becomes even more interested in them.
They both try to play things cool – less of a struggle for Slim than for Queen, who’s sharply aware that the officer (Sturgill Simpson, who wrote and performed the title song in Jim Jarmusch’s recent The Dead Don’t Die) is intent on inflaming the situation. He orders Slim out of the car; when Queen also gets out, to record the incident on her phone, the officer shoots at her: the bullet grazes her upper leg. Slim wrestles the officer to the ground, grabs his gun and shoots him, virtually in self-defence and fatally. Back in the car, Queen tells Slim they have a simple choice: report what has happened, which, she says, will mean life in prison; or go on the run. Slim, who’s close to his parents, is appalled by the idea of becoming a fugitive but can’t argue with either Queen’s reasoning or her force of personality. His native acquiescence, evident even in the diner, now comes into play in unimaginably extreme circumstances. Two young people who’d never seen each other in the flesh until a few hours ago are suddenly conjoined twins. They will spend the rest of their lives together.
It’s easy enough to believe that Queen’s logic overpowers Slim’s qualms, harder to credit that she so unhesitatingly abandons her successful legal career. Hard to believe at first, anyway: Lena Wraithe’s canny screenplay repeatedly accounts for improbabilities in the story – even if this isn’t always enough to dispel scepticism. Later on, Queen reveals the traumatic start to her professional life: the very first client she defended in court was her uncle, for the killing of her mother. That’s a melodramatically unlikely set of circumstances yet, in combination with Queen’s certainty that Slim and she wouldn’t get justice if they faced trial, it makes a kind of sense of her drastic pragmatism in response to the police officer’s death.
As the film continues, you may find yourself querying why the pair don’t reflect more on the succession of grim events that occur in the course of their travels. There are two good reasons. First, they don’t have time; they have to keep moving to stay ahead of the law. Second, they become infatuated with each other. The starting point of a first date is effective. Not far into their road trip, Slim asks Queen whether, if their diner meeting had ended uneventfully, she’d have wanted a second date. Her honest answer, at that stage, is no but she soon changes her mind. Being unknown quantities to each other at the outset means that the couple’s unplanned, continuous companionship is a genuine voyage of discovery, with exceptional potential to draw them close.
Even so, bits of the story feel false. Queen and Slim find uneasy refuge first with Earl (Bokeem Woodbine), the uncle who caused her mother’s death. Though initially reluctant to help, he lets them have a car, which soon breaks down. As Queen talks with an auto-shop mechanic[2], Slim wanders into the back of the shop. He finds a telephone there (he and Queen disposed of their own mobiles when they went on the run) and calls his father (Thom Gossom Jr). It’s as if Matsoukas and Wraithe feel the need to acknowledge Slim’s family ties but, having done so, consider the matter closed: the phone call home leaves no residue.
While they’re waiting for their car to be fixed, they spend time with the mechanic’s teenage son, Junior (Jahi Di’Allo Winston). The boy not only knows who Queen and Slim are but considers them heroes. The next day, Junior takes part in a street demonstration in support of the two runaways, and loses his life there. (The whole story’s timeframe is less than a week; it seems very soon for public protests to be taking place on the scale suggested, even allowing that the protagonists’ plight is politically combustible, and for the power of social media.) Queen and Slim learn of Junior’s death during a rare breathing space on their journey. Their reaction to the news, a shared expression of nearly wordless regret, seems mechanical. Junior’s death, which would surely nag at the people whose plight involved him in the protest, barely gets another mention.
The sociopolitical import of the film is dispiriting, and not just in the encounter that (only one word for it) triggers the story. This kind of manifestation of American police racism is by now familiar but Queen & Slim is also troubling for its description of ethnic loyalties in response to such an event. Although both main characters disguise their appearance, almost every African-American they subsequently meet – including a bartender (Karen Kaia Livers) and Junior’s father, as well as the boy himself – seems to recognise them. None of these people is inclined to shop two fellow blacks to the police. Nor, in the most startling instance of this reaction, is a black police officer in Savannah, Georgia.
Queen and Slim have headed to Savannah to meet with a white man called Shepherd, whose life Earl saved when they served together in Iraq. Shepherd, according to Earl, will be ready to help arrange the couple’s escape to Cuba, their intended eventual destination. While Queen and Slim are in the home of Shepherd (Flea) and his wife (Chloë Sevigny), a SWAT team descends on the place. After hiding in a crawlspace, Queen and Slim jump from an upstairs window and enter the garage below. Queen dislocates her shoulder in the fall; Slim fixes it but her yelps of pain are heard by a black officer (Andre Shanks). The white cop (Robert Walker Branchaud) partnering him pooh-poohs, in insulting, racist language, his suggestion that a person cried out. The black cop investigates nevertheless. Slim gets a car in the garage working, and prepares to drive off. The garage door opens and he and Queen find themselves face to face with the black officer. To their astonishment, he lets them go on their way.
The episode serves as dramatic shorthand for white racism’s fuelling of racialised black solidarity. The African-American cop presumably came to the Shepherds’ house prepared to help with the arrest of the wanted couple. His white colleague’s disparaging words and attitude changed his mind. This moment is made all the more potent through its juxtaposition with sequences involving the Shepherds, the only sympathetic white characters in Queen & Slim. Chloë Sevigny persuasively illustrates Mrs Shepherd’s moral conflict. When her guests arrive, she admits to unease about sheltering them. When, after they’ve gone, the police question the Shepherds, she keeps her counsel, along with her husband.
Conflicted feelings explode shockingly in the street demonstration where Junior is shown, none too realistically, in the vanguard. Melina Matsoukas focuses, from Junior’s point of view, on the police officer coming towards him. The approaching officer, his face invisible behind a visored helmet, cuts an ominous figure; you assume, especially because he’s seen through Junior’s eyes, that he’ll be white. It’s a relief when he removes the visor and is black. Then Junior pulls a gun and shoots the officer (Lucky Johnson). (The retaliatory shooting of the teenager by police is reported, not shown.) Jahi Di’Allo Winston conveys credible heat-of-the-moment confusion on Junior’s part but the sequence leaves you uneasy, as well as shaken. Matsoukas repeatedly crosscuts between the demo and a secluded spot in woodland, where Queen and Slim have sex in their car. In its sensitive, affecting way, this lovemaking is strong enough to compete with the street protest for the viewer’s attention. You wonder not only why Junior shot the black cop but whether the director is more interested in the impact rather than the meaning of his action.
Nevertheless, Melina Matsoukas, best known as a music video director, often impresses in her debut cinema feature. The pivotal dispute at the start is skilfully handled. The police officer’s anger renews itself whenever he gets a sniff of opposition. (Standing outside the car, Slim asks the cop to hurry up and gets a furious response; Slim explains, almost apologetically, that it’s a cold night.) The section at Earl’s place – which also houses the prostitutes he pimps for – is well observed; so are the closely following scenes in a blues club. This is meaningfully a road movie. Matsoukas and her DP Tat Ratcliffe give a strong impression of the distances being travelled and of how often the roads, ironically in view of the principals being fugitives, are empty.
A journey that starts in Ohio proceeds through Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia to Florida. Although responsible for only one death, Queen and Slim have been dubbed ‘the black Bonnie and Clyde’ by the media. As they approach the plane that will fly them to Cuba and safety, they look back to find that a phalanx of police cars has materialised. The police, as their uniform badges make clear, are from Monroe County. That’s not an uncommon American place name but the Florida version’s nearest namesake is in neighbouring Alabama – a resonant location in racial-drama screen history (witness the recent Just Mercy). An overly zealous female officer shoots Queen dead. Ignoring police instructions to lie down, Slim moves slowly forward, carrying Queen’s corpse. He’s shot down in a hail of gunfire which, although it’s much briefer, evokes the final sequence of Bonnie and Clyde.
Both the (British) leads are excellent. Jodie Smith-Turner has the more obvious impact, thanks to Queen’s personality and to Smith-Turner’s being a newcomer to starring roles. Yet Daniel Kaluuya’s portrait of Earl eventually seems more complex and cuts deeper. The mournful post-mortem finale is overlong but street art commemorating the eponymous heroes as martyrs makes for a powerful parting shot. Queen & Slim is strong in plenty of ways but the events it describes and the point of view it reflects combine to make the film a lowering experience.
5 February 2020
[1] The name is spelt as per the adjective when it appears on a television news headline, without the ‘a’ elsewhere in the film’s finale. I guess it’s the TV news version that’s (credibly) misspelt.
[2] The actor is uncredited on IMDb.
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