How many times have we seen a white police officer pull over an African-American driver in a movie? Enough to know exactly what to do, even if we have never been in the situation ourselves. Be polite and cooperative. Hands where they can see them. No sudden movements. Even then, an innocent black driver might not make it out alive. In Queen & Slim, the black couple of the title (played by Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith) do survive, but the white cop doesn’t. Like us, they know these incidents rarely end in justice. So they hit the road and hope for the best.
Queen & Slim, directed by Melina Matsoukas and written by Lena Waithe, takes a stylish detour off what has become a well-travelled road in the Black Lives Matter era. In the past few years, we have had numerous takes on the subject of police killings of innocent African Americans, often made by black film-makers: Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station (which ennobled the real life and death of Oscar Grant); The Hate U Give; Blindspotting; Monsters and Men. Reality has not just fuelled the passion behind these movies, it has provided the corroboration, in the form of amateur mobile phone and dashcam evidence of real-life police brutality.
As long as it keeps happening in the real world, it ought to be dealt with in film, but is there a danger of such incidents becoming little more than a plot device? Steve McQueen’s Widows, for example, threw in a racist-police-shooting backstory almost as an afterthought; for me, the film’s one misstep. The Birth of a Nation director Nate Parker attempted a comeback at last year’s Venice film festival (following the fallout of a historic rape allegation against him) with American Skin, in which a traffic stop results in the shooting of Parker’s character’s teenage son. Parker responds by holding the local police station hostage and staging a mock retrial. Many critics regarded the film as a heavy-handed stunt.
Queen & Slim has also had its share of critics. Some black commentators have accused it of mining actual political issues for superficial myth-making (Matsoukas directed Beyoncé’s Formation video, which received similar criticism). Others have questioned how many more movies we need about African-American trauma before fatigue sets in. But there has also been applause for Queen & Slim’s attempt to portray the beauty as well as the suffering of the black experience, even if the two are sometimes clumsily juxtaposed (as when a crucial love-making scene is intercut with another police shooting). Either way, the movie and the debate around it suggest we have reached a new phase in post-Black Lives Matter film-making; one, perhaps, that has a line to tread between familiarity and novelty, or reality and artifice.
