Introducing...THE POWER TRIO
WITH QUEEN & SLIM, LENA WAITHE, MELINA MATSOUKAS AND JODIE TURNER-SMITH FLIP THE SCRIPT ON A HAUNTINGLY FAMILIAR NARRATIVE. BY ANITA LITTLE
The first 12 minutes of Queen & Slim, the much-anticipated first feature film from writer Lena Waithe and director Melina Matsoukas, offers a revisionist twist on a familiar scenario in America. A routine traffic stop ends with two black motorists walking away and a white officer dead. An unremarkable first date between two electrifying leads, played by newcomer Jodie Turner-Smith (Queen) and Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya (Slim), ends with the couple on the run as a nationwide manhunt ensues. The film is many things. It’s Bonnie and Clyde for the Black Lives Matter era; it’s a look at the power of black resilience and the spectacle of black death; it’s a timeless reimagining of the blaxploitation genre. But in the end, it’s the best meditation on black romance in an impossibly long time. A story of defiance and protest, it takes the tragedy one could anticipate when a black person encounters a racist cop and turns it on its head. ‘The act of committing that type of violence is not something that is glorified, but it’s really a comment on how black people are put in this kind of
“THERE IS A LOT OF PRESSURE FOR US TO DO WELL – FOR THE CULTURE. FAILING IS ONE OF MY GREATEST FEARS”
life-or-death situation way too often,’ says Turner-Smith. ‘These people make the radical choice to survive, even when it means doing something so horrible that there’s no coming back from it. Even thinking about the concept raises the hairs on my arms, because it really is a film about black survival at all costs.’ As women of colour, the project was deeply personal for those involved. For Matsoukas, she felt a responsibility to do justice to such an important story. ‘In our success comes other black people’s success, so there is a lot of pressure for us to do well – for the culture,’ she says. ‘It’s hard to create art with that weight, and I feel it every day. It’s one of my greatest fears, failing. I just want to make my people proud.’ The real-life high-profile shootings of two young African-Americans, 12-year-old Tamir Rice [who was shot dead by police while playing with a pellet gun in a park in Ohio] and 17-year-old Trayvon Martin [who was unarmed and fatally shot in Florida by a neighbourhood-watch volunteer who had called the police to report Martin as ‘a suspicious person’] weighed heavy on the writer and director’s minds when they were making the film. ‘We know these names not because of their accomplishments but because they were killed,’ says Waithe. ‘Black people are sometimes more celebrated in death than in life.’ Furthermore, they made the conscious choice to open the film in Cleveland [where Rice was killed in 2O14]. ‘I had actually scouted Cleveland the year before [for a commercial], and I went to visit the site where he was killed in the playground. Everything is based on authenticity,’ says Matsoukas. Waithe found that the ability to bring control and agency to this kind of narrative was cathartic. ‘It was so empowering in terms of my experience in Hollywood, where I had my own version of Jim Crow,’ she says. ‘I didn’t truly experience what it means to feel like a second-class citizen until I sold my first TV show. Because out of five people, I was the fifth most important person in the room. During the first season [of The Chi], I didn’t have any real agency, so that’s when I started working on the script. It was almost my way of rebelling and reminding myself I do have a gift. They can’t appreciate it now, but they will.’ The film is also a rare depiction of black sensuality that’s not voyeuristic. ‘Sex can be portrayed as something that’s very animal. And black people, especially black men and women of our complexion, are often hypersexualised,’ says Turner-Smith. ‘[There’s] a dichotomy of blackness where there can be such violence and terror, and yet in the middle of that, black people can find intimacy and beauty in the comfort of each other.’ Despite this backdrop of racial discrimination and generational trauma, there’s a universal story at the heart of this film: two people falling in love while the world burns down around them.