2019 | 2hr 12mins | Crime Drama Romance | Rated 15 | Dir. Melina Matsouka
Education – it goes a long way. That was my initial reaction to Melina Matsouka’s romantic road crime drama, Queen & Slim, and one that I still hold to this day. Although released in 2019 it was not a film I had heard of until the summer of 2020, when protests erupted in the aftermath to the murder of George Floyd and subsequently flooded the mainstream news outlets across the globe. Social media turned, rightfully, into platforms to enable – not disable – the voices of the marginalised communities and it was upon these sites, whilst absorbing all the information I could about various movements, predominately Black Lives Matter, that I stumbled upon a cultural resource.
This resource came in the form of a list, a list of films, to help educate those who had never seen the brutality of the American police force translated onto the screen before. To say I was curious is an uncomfortable truth to have to write, but one I write, nonetheless. I, a white woman, like many people living in the privileged west, know of racism, know victims of it, and know it still exists very much in the structures and attitudes of our society whether consciously acknowledged or not. To say it was an uncomfortable watch is not a dishonest review but one that does not give justice to the film or the portrayal of its leading characters: Queen and Slim, played respectively by Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya. The 132-minute run time centres on a young black couple who go on the run after killing a police officer during a traffic stop. This is a tag line and one you will often see in descriptors surrounding this film and its plot. Queen & Slim offers us much more than an awareness to police brutality and racial injustice in America and the remaining west, it offers us tenderness. This is found in both the depiction of what it means for a man to take another’s life as well as, in the budding relationship, and bond, forged between two people who, in different circumstances, would not have ever seen each other or spoken again.
It is within the tender moments of Matsouka’s direction, that arrive and depart much like the camera refractions from the costal shots, that allow the audience the opportunity to engage in a conversation not only about race, and the continuously failing ‘justice’ system of the United States, but of the moral implications of the triggering event that she directs. We, much like the characters involved, are made to feel as those what we saw was the truth despite everyone having their own version of the event that took place: the killing of a white police officer. What Matsouka sets up is a scenario we are all very much aware happens and choose to let slide: American police officers performing arbitrary traffic stops on the black community. As the second scene begins, we are pulled into the film by its direction, the camera focusing on the couple from the front of the car as Slim drives and Queen plays with his phone, distracting him so he swerves. Kaluuya and Turner-Smith find a natural rhythm with each other as they adopt the dialogue that Lena Waithe, the writer of the film’s screenplay, produced for them to use. It is within these comfortable moments, in the laughter and teasings of the characters as they awkwardly try to navigate each other’s space, that Matsouka’s skill as a director comes into fruition. We, much like the black community that Queen and Slim belong to, begin to feel comfortable. It is only in the jarring moments of the deep-rooted racism that the United States perpetuates, that we remember an uncomfortable truth that is many people’s realities: black people are not allowed to become comfortable in a world designed for white western privilege.
What then follows is an event that we have come to anticipate but not correct in American culture, a white police officer pulls his gun and fires to stop Turner-Smith’s character, Queen, from filming her and her date from being harassed by him, someone who is meant to protect and serve all American citizens. Yet, what jolts us as an audience how the scenario flips itself so that the white police officer is the one to end up dead on the ground as Slim grabbles with him to get the gun away, leading it to fire and, consequently, kill the police officer whom they are being harassed by. All of this occurs within the first 15 minutes of the film and what is most startling to me is not the killing of a police officer, although that was unexpected and horrifying despite his racist behaviour, but the look in Slim’s eyes as he realises his life is over: he killed a white cop.
It is in the initial aftermath of the killing, when the screen turns black and scene three begins as a title sequence, that we hear the voiceover of Queen and Slim as they argue over what to do. We all know from the start that as soon as the trigger was pulled their lives would be on a countdown to their deaths, rapidly accelerated by the events that take place across the run time. What we did not know is that throughout the course of this film, the heightened emotions and pressures of being killers on the run would allow these two people who had an awkward first date to fall in love, sharing parts of themselves to each other that they both have previously neglected to share. It is in Queen’s last words: ‘can I be your legacy?’ that cut the deepest for me as a viewer because as we watch their lives run out in front of us, we know this could have been prevented. What we can take away from Queen & Slim is the tenderness and compassion nearly all the characters they interact with on the road show them in some various ways or forms. They may not be the nicest, or most pleasant people, but they come together displaying a form of kindness that we should all learn from and move forward with. The poet and essayist Audre Lorde said it best when she wrote:
‘’We must each of us recognise our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own... For instance, ‘I can’t possibly teach Black women’s writing – their experience is so different from mine’. Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another, ‘She’s a white woman and lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?’ Or again, ‘This woman writes of her sons and I have no children.’ And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.’’
It is within these words that I hold hope, because to share in another’s experience is to express an understanding of something outside of yourself. Much like the beginning of this review I echo the statement that education goes a long way, but I shall add to it now too. Education goes a long way but so does compassion, and that is what Queen & Slim depicts but also teaches its viewers.
- Megan Brady
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