Micheal Ward and Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn in Lovers Rock.[/caption] The film’s title sounds, at first, like a reference to some secret place where young romantics hide away from intrusive eyes — the kind of place Martha might need to escape to since even attending a party means creating a ruse for her family. Although, to those familiar with the cultural zeitgeist at the film’s core, it’s a clear reference to the romantic subgenre of reggae that populates the film’s soundscape from start to finish. That said, in a film about young lovers being drawn into each other’s orbit through the power of music, “Lovers Rock” can’t help but feel like a complete sentence; a statement of truth, and a state of being which the filmmakers intend to paint in brush strokes both broad and specific. Romantic and sexual tension fills the air, as beautiful strangers undress each other with their eyes from across the room. But there’s a secondary tension too, a specific cultural tension which McQueen & co. weave into the film’s fabric with expert subtlety. The film may present its Afro-Caribbean characters as a collective hoping to escape the gaze of white supremacy — white characters appear but a few times, in the distance and as aggressive intrusions — but Lovers Rock doesn’t flatten the West Indian diaspora into a monolith. The film is too short (and too propulsive) to stop and ponder its politics in words, but its use of language and accents tells its own story. In key moments, Martha, an outsider to this household, draws the ire of its host Cynthia (Ellis George). What seems to separate them (an element separating several other characters as well) is the way they speak: Martha code-switches with ease between her seemingly “native” English accent and her family’s Caribbean patois, though for Cynthia and other characters in the household, the latter is their native tongue. It’s a different accent, but it’s functionally its own dialect too — when I asked McQueen about it at the film’s NYFF press conference, he said he treated it as its own language when writing the film (lead actors Ward and St. Aubyn agreed with that summation). Without the need for exploring logistics, this mere difference in verbal approach paints an entire backdrop. It speaks to the varying experiences of these characters; some were British-born, or immigrated while they were young enough to adopt the cadence of their new country; others immigrated later (for them, the West Indies is still the first place they called home), but they all traverse a thin line between two different cultures. The standard English accent is more rigid, more uptight, though the characters’ West Indian accents have a musicality to them that fits the film’s premise; switching from one dialect to the next feels like immersing oneself in a space of freedom, where white cultural expectations of what’s “proper” is no longer a concern. [caption id="attachment_2413623" align="alignnone" width="720"]
Lovers Rock's Alexander James-Blake and Kadeem Ramsay. (Credit: Parisa Taghizadeh/BBC/McQueen Limited)[/caption] These are lived experiences that, even within a collective diaspora, can lead to in-group, out-group tendencies (they rear their head once more even in McQueen’s Mangrove, a courtroom drama), but they are not the central story of Lovers Rock. They are merely what grounds the story in the real and the tangible, for the story itself is ethereal. These interpersonal tensions are necessary window-dressing to a film largely comprising scenes of song and dance. The film is a dream of sorts, and like any dream, the intrusion of real-world anxieties is a given. The songs, for instance, don’t transition smoothly into one another — instead, the DJs speak to the crowd, as a “Selector” lines up the next record — so it’s a dream that feels occasionally disturbed, but in manner that feels authentic to the way these parties really played out. Before long, it draws both the partygoers and the audience back into its trance for extended periods, allowing us to re-orient ourselves before submitting to its embrace. McQueen and cinematographer Shabier Kirchner create a warm, dimly-lit dance floor which they navigate with panache. Wide lenses might seem like the instinctive choice, given how much space they capture at once without the need to really readjust focus as the camera moves. But the lenses employed here are long and voyeuristic, flattening space and creating shallow-focus portraits of each individual as the camera zips between them (and, as the night wears on, as it zips between each couple dancing closely, the sweat practically shimmering off their skin). Tensions often arise during the film, be they cultural or stemming from other jealousies, nut they’re soon diffused through dance. The characters become swept up in a rhythmic ecstasy, and we, the viewers, are allowed to bask in the warm glow of what feels like a deeply spiritual celebration. As the characters slip into a carefree trance — far away from the discomforts we’ve seen right outside their door — the film itself becomes entrancing too. An extended sequence set to Janet Kay’s 1979 single “Silly Games” might just be the single most moving and exciting scene of the year, as the party guest not only get lost in the music, but become one with it, even as it fades out and they continue the song on their own terms for several minutes, as if it were some ritualistic chant. If Gaspar Noé’s Climax from 2018 — programmed at this year’s NYFF by filmmaker John Waters — is a depiction of Hell through dance, then McQueen’s Lovers Rock feels like dancing in Paradise. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=igns-best-reviewed-movies-of-2020&captions=true"]from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/33mhHBI
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