"Well, if it's not the black Bonnie and Clyde!", The couple in the center of the film "Queen & Slim" gets to hear halfway through their flight from Ohio to Florida. The comparison is not really correct because, unlike Bonnie and Clyde, the young man and the young woman are not bank robbers, but rather a lawyer and a seller. They had a Tinder date in a diner in Cleveland a few evenings earlier and didn't even get along very well.
But they are black, and that makes the crucial difference here. That's why they come into conflict with the police, that's why a fatal shot is fired, that's why they flee, and that's why people across the country end up taking to the streets in solidarity with them.
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"Queen & Slim": hope and despair"Queen & Slim" is the debut film by multiple Grammy and MTV Video Music Awards winner Melina Matsoukas, best known for clips such as the one for the song "Formation" from "Lemonade", the epochal album of the American R - & - B queen Beyoncé. In it, Matsouka's dancers marched up in a kind of black panther uniform, while Beyoncé sang that she preferred her "negro nose" with wide "Jackson 5 nostrils".
Similar to how Matsoukas, together with other directors, made a video for every song on the album for "Lemonade", she now does the same for "Queen & Slim". The individual stages of the escape drama seem like the chapters of a film that is held together less by an arc of tension than by the stylistic devices used: above all the sensual, lush images of the cameraman Tat Radcliffe and the indulgent R&B of the black British singer and songwriter Devonté Hynes.
Sometimes the fugitives encounter silent solidarity, a bartender is given them by a black bartender or a hiding place is organized by a pair of white lawyers (played by Flea, the bass player of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Chloë Sevigny). Sometimes the two wanted cause mischief, police officers are killed on their behalf and friendships betrayed.
The image of the USA that emerges from this is ambiguous. The violence and injustice that racism has produced for centuries are clearly shown in "Queen & Slim". On the other hand there are the complicated realities of life, in which there is not one survival strategy for all blacks and not everyone acts honorably at all times.
"Queen & Slim"
USA 2019
Directed by Melina Matsoukas
Script: Lena Waithe
Actors: Daniel Kaluuya, Jodie Turner-Smith, Bokeem Woodbine, Chloë Sevigny, Flea, Indya Moore, Benito Martinez
Distribution: Universal Pictures Germany
Length: 133 minutes
FSK: from 12 years
Start: January 9, 2020
The two outstanding protagonists are the haven of calm in this storm of signs and feelings. For one thing, it's Daniel Kaluuya. For another role, in the horror film "Get Out", he has already been nominated for an Oscar. The main female character is the newcomer Jodie Turner-Smith. Kaluuya plays a sedate, principled family man who accepts bad diner food as long as the business is run by blacks. And Turner-Smith a woman who only relies on herself and prefers to eat nothing but bland salad. When at the end of her Tinder date there is a brief question in the air as to whether the evening might end with sex, a short snort in turn provides the unfriendly answer.
In the course of their escape, however, both leave old certainties behind. The longer you drive through the country, the more you can open yourself to the other and their truths. After all, they actually learn to love each other - symbolically possibly a sign of reconciliation within the black community. When they receive new clothes from supporters, they undergo another transformation: they become pop figures in wine-red velvet tracksuits and violet mini-dresses with tiger stripes, and they stand out from the ugly present with larger-than-life dignity and glamor.
The resilience is in this stylization. Similar to the superhero film "Black Panther", "Queen & Slim" serves the escapistically motivated need for a new black iconography, for hero characters for the desolate now. However, Matsouka's and screenwriter Lena Waithe doesn't weaken the political force of her film. "Queen & Slim" refuses to choose between political realism and ecstatic fantasy and simply delivers both hope and despair.
In the video: The trailer for "Queen & Slim"
The title also fits. The main characters are not called "Queen & Slim" at all. For the longest time in the film they even have no name at all. Only at the very end can you find out what the two really are called - they are meaningless, banal names. Nevertheless, they have become Queen and Slim, two icons of a new cut that no longer need a comparison with Bonnie and Clyde, because they stand for themselves.