Director Melina Matsoukas’s Queen & Slim exudes across its opening minutes the concision of an old B movie, setting up its central characters and conflict without an ounce of fat. The film’s opening scene, set at a diner where Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith) and Slim (Daniel Kaluuya) go on a Tinder date, quickly establishes the characters’ personalities: Queen, regally poised and faintly disgusted to have been taken to such a cheap place, softens when Slim notes that the establishment is black-owned. That mild rejoinder to his date’s huffy irritation says a lot about Slim’s quiet, unassuming smarts and empathy, which occasionally peek out from behind an exterior of timidity and flighty distraction.
The simplicity with which the film, written by Lena Waithe, introduces its characters extends to the subsequent scene in which they’re stopped without cause by a police officer (Sturgill Simpson) clearly jonesing for a reason to harass black people. For no reason, the cop forces Slim out of the car on this cold, Ohio winter night, rifling through the man’s trunk until Queen, an attorney, decides to call the officer out on his behavior. The immediate escalation ends with the policeman firing on the woman, prompting Slim into a fight that ends with the civilian shooting the cop in self-defense. As Slim gazes in horror at what he’s done, Queen, knowing exactly what awaits them in the justice system, springs into action, plotting an escape with the efficiency of someone familiar with how police operate.
This opening sets the standard for the way the film, for a time, conveys narrative and character information through concise dialogue and visuals. Matsoukas shoots her main characters in separate close-ups throughout the early stretch of their drive out of town, emphasizing the manner in which they’re uneasy strangers thrown together by fate. But gradually, as their mutual trust builds, the two begin to share the frame, and soon they’re noticing when someone stares at them too long as news bulletins spread of their crime. Cinematographer Tat Radcliffe lights Queen and Slim in shades of blue, green, and yellow that provide striking contrasts for the actors’ skin tones, while also lending a neo-noir vibe to the film.
Indeed, Queen & Slim wears its influences on its sleeve, going so far as to have one character explicitly refer to the eponymous couple as “the black Bonnie and Clyde.” But it’s in chasing such comparisons that the film starts to lose focus. We see from the outset of Queen and Slim’s quest that they’re normal people trapped in a no-win scenario, propelled by fear. Yet when they begin to become a cause célèbre among blacks across the country, folk heroes fighting back against police brutality, they begin to transform, their initial caution giving way to a recklessness that feels more narratively convenient than logical. Even the pair’s dynamic flips without warning or reason, as the reserved Slim turns into the more assertive of the two while Queen transitions from a cold pragmatist to someone who indulges in every dreamy flight of fancy. The initial reversal of stereotypical gender roles thus reverts to the norm.
Matsoukas incorporates into the film a great deal of imagery that links the fears and anxieties of today’s African-Americans to the history of racist abuse. It’s in the sight of prisoner chain gangs working rural fields in an eerie echo of slavery, and in the network of both black and white people who help Queen and Slim along—a contemporary Underground Railroad leading out of the country. Such loaded imagery intriguingly places Queen and Slim against a wider backdrop of exploitation and resistance, but soon the context is used only as background shading for their relationship as it strengthens. Where the characters first seemed to exist as an embodiment of the pressures of American black life, that political commentary is eventually externalized to make space for a more generic lovers-on-the-lam romance.
The political and personal collide in a sex scene that recalls the famous one from Munich. Yet where Steven Spielberg’s film used the physical intimacy between two characters to communicate the psychological hang-ups affecting a man’s political violence, Queen & Slim so clumsily jumps between its main characters’ lovemaking and the anti-cop rally held in their honor that it cheapens both threads. The scene epitomizes the way that the film escalates its romantic and social images to extremes that cannot be reconciled, losing the careful balance between the two tones that it achieved so subtly and powerfully at the start.
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