Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen, 2020) (Patreon)

Mostly because I have been focused on the Currents selections, I have not paid a great deal of attention to the Main Slate, at least apart from knowing what's in it. I am not reading reviews, and have mostly avoided synopses, just because I have a lot going on at the moment. I would like to congratulate Mike D'Angelo on this state of affairs, because what it means is that I am going into a lot of these films in a tabula rasa state (his preferred mode, both experientially and ideologically), rather than my usual fully-briefed, overly aware approach to viewing new films. So it's harder to go in with my scalpel in hand, ready to dissect.

Still, Lovers Rock is such a tsunami of formalism, it's hard not to come away with a fairly concrete idea of what one thinks of it. Although McQueen and co-writer Courttia Newland provide the slightest wisp of a plot -- a group of Londoners, mostly of Jamaican extraction, come together for a dance party at the start of the Thatcher era -- this is an overwhelmingly immersive cinematic work, one that privileges atmosphere above all else. 

At certain junctures along Lovers Rock's admirably slim 70 minute running time, McQueen zeroes in on two young people who have just met, and are beginning a tentative courtship. Martha (first-time film actor Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) has her defenses up, clearly having been mistreated by men in the past. But the quiet, sensitive Franklyn (Micheal Ward) gradually wins her over, not only by taking a genuine interest in her as a person, but by the contrast McQueen sets up between him and the outsized machismo on display throughout the evening.

But most of Lovers Rock is like an unexpected, startlingly glorious mix of Terence Davies' music-driven period pieces and, by the film's crescendo, Gaspar Noé's Climax. McQueen conjures a distinct time and a place, the necessarily insular community of West Indian immigrants who were only just beginning to find their place in the U.K., for whom soul music and dub reggae were a lifeline to shared identity and cultural meaning. (Before long, anti-racist whites and other non-Black Britons of color would join the party, and the country would change forever.) We are thrown onto the dance floor and invited to lose ourselves, and it's a thrilling experience. The spell was only broken every ten minutes when I stopped to Shazam every killer track.