Now Playing: Queen and Slim... Fantastic Fugitivity
My least favorite part of the film is rehashing Luther Vandross’s body size and weight while his song was playing. Luther Vandross died in 2005. Stop talking about his body and let him rest in peace.
Woosah...
Lena Waithe and Melina Masoukas work their magic to make a brave and truly romantic film. Yes, the main characters die. Yes, they were on the run, but tender, love, and care can happen even in the most stressful of times. Ask your parents!
This movie features Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya - titular Queen and Slim - a pair that has a not-so-random encounter thanks to Tinder. The two embody what it means to be dangerously in love as they escape the unjust consequences of their actions. Queen and Slim feels like an epic but is only 132 minutes and fills up each minute gracefully and without a single wasted frame. Lena Waithe wasted no space in writing this screenplay and story, filling it with as much black subject matter as possible. The film deals with the police state, fugitivity, and accidental heroes in a way that brings academic discourse to cinema.
The film also dabbles in fantasy. No, there are no lightsabers or extraterrestrial beings falling from the sky to takeover Earth for the '99, but the film does depict the titular characters' journey as if they were on the path of a contemporary Underground Railroad. Can you imagine the 2019 Underground Railroad? I can't! I have very little faith that it could properly function in the age of the Internet. The original required secrecy, hiding places, several unnamed people aka conductors, and a willingness to sacrifice your freedom so that others can know what that's like. In the Internet of 2019, Instagram is poppin', Black Twitter is a sentient being with its own Wikipedia page, and everyone has cameras inside and outside of their domiciles. And the old but still continuous oppression faves - gentrification, redlining, and capitalism - have rendered many black people nomadic or worse homeless. The reality of the Queen and Slim’s actions are big and loud. Yet, at every stopping point in their route they seem shocked and surprised that people know exactly who they were. That wreaks of fantasy and naivety that black adults are not allowed to have, especially in 2019. Slim seems very new to being a fugitive, while Queen tends to have most of the answers and knows who to contact all along the way. Which makes me question if she was a fugitive before or after their dinner date? Surely to be black in this country means to live in the unseen and in constant escape from all things colonialism/imperialism. Yet the pair are constantly noticed and watched along their journey. So it is doubly fanciful that they could make it from Ohio to Florida without being stopped much earlier in their tracks. Even Assata was caught and imprisoned...
The pair’s unwillingness to become state property speaks volumes to the conditions of the prison system in America and the ways in which the formerly incarcerated are able to survive on the outside. Queen and Slim would rather live-and-run and love-and-die than see their day in court. Queen is a criminal lawyer and the most adamant against their own perceived due process. Queen embodies a total resistance to the carceral state. Her refusal to acknowledge fault or wrongdoing when the star-crossed lovers met police violence with fatal self-defense is illustrative of a huge FUCK YOU to this nation's fascist police brotherhood. Furthermore, on her body, we can read an inherent Black feminist critique. That is, that Black femmes are faced with disproportionate levels of violence than their masculine counterparts. This is evidenced by the fact that Queen herself, until the very end, was on the receiving end of much more physical harm than Slim. She was grazed by the officer's bullet in the most critical seen of the film, she pulled her shoulder after jumping out the window to evade the police in Savannah, and she was shot and killed first when the pair met their tragic end. I don't know why people hated on this movie so hard! It was a whole vibe the first time we saw it -- like "fuck the police and fuck ME!”
Oooohhh! That soundtrack jamming too! The film features songs from Bilal, Raphael Saadiq, 6lack, Earthgang, Tiana Major9, and Ms. Lauryn Hill. It also features a reworking of Pharcyde’s ‘Runnin’ which is haunting and moving. Credit goes to the entire music department for the film including Sean Barrett, Jordan Cox, Joseph S. DeBeasi, Benjamin Hoff, Kier Lehman, and Peter Rotter. You all did that!
Go see the movie for yourself and enjoy being a witness to black art.
-- CIXgod & indigo