Lovers Rock - 2020
When I started training for triathlons about five years ago, I hardly knew heads from tails. I just sought to get the right equipment, start putting the time/reps in, and over time to get "race ready" (whatever that meant). But, as time went by, I was able to hone the craft some. To update the gear, read the articles on form and heart rate, reassess my goals and the like. So it was about two years ago that I discovered a swimming style advocated by a friend which had videos and tutorials on Youtube. I searched up the instructor and found this: TOTAL IMMERSION swimming. Regardless of the qualities of the workout, I thought it had a nice ring to it.
"Total immersion." It was those words that hit me again like a ton of bricks while viewing Lovers Rock, because that is PRECISELY what Steve McQueen has done with this second episode of the Small Axe series. Lovers Rock is not about plot. In point of fact, I think it is weakest when it pursues other story elements pertaining to a few characters at the dance. The side trails down other avenues only serve to break the entrancing, meditative quality of the forms in motion at the film's center.
So, if not plot, what exactly does Lovers Rock concern then? Well, it's bodies as art. It’s shots of hands and hips. Swaying and moving. Elbows and ankles. Sweat which falls from moving figures and hands tracing walls which only cage in the exuberance of these souls lifting high their voices. McQueen puts us right there on the dance floor. Using handheld cams, we not only play voyeur to the little professions of love between young people, the bantering of minds, sometimes playful, others coy which make up the complex human mating ritual. We are IN it. We are a part of the revelry.
Then the film turns a corner, as the DJ Samson, the voice from on high, prods the crowd to join in singing "Silly Games." First there is the music track and that familiar echoing refrain of the siren. Then we hear just human sounds. The solidarity of voices raised together. People who know the pain of suffering and prejudice just outside these walls, but have left it aside for one night of exultation. The acapella singing just keeps going and going. McQueen gives us more long takes of the bodies present, eyes closed, thoughts turned in on themselves. It’s almost like a spiritual experience that they all are having. Indeed, I think it is.
Soon, the melding of voices and harmonies begin to sound like a church choir. A kind of revival service with no overt spiritual or religious overtones unfolds right before our eyes. It's just souls and bodies, love born and affections carried. And again, we not only watch but participate in it. See, Lovers Rock is the very opposite of our hypercutting style of cinema today. Mr. McQueen just lets whole songs play while very little other plot elements are occurring. It's a kind of reverie. The almost uncomfortably long takes afford us the opportunity to reflect, to process, and to join in the human experience of it all.
The entire Small Axe series concerns the people of the West Indies in London in a certain period in history and the prejudice and difficult life they encountered there. But Lovers Rock is about gathering strength to face the storm, new love, reggae music, and the kind of joy which feels kinda like riding down a city street on the handlebars of a new crush. In a word, it's about LIFE.
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