by Jason Adams
Black joy is revolutionary. Even as a white dude -- even then! -- that's not hard for me to get. People of color have been saddled with being the standard bearers for suffering for so long -- look no further than the Slavery horror film Antebellum out in cinemas this weekend; or hey how about the news every single day and night? -- that joy becomes its own act of defiance: just song, dance, and smiles. A shuffling off of the strangleholds, the exemplary expectations, the time to scream proud and wild and free, not a thought or burden in the world. Liberation exists in the very molecules of that space...
White people see that, and across our history we've gone to great lengths to weaponize each and every one of those joys in our abject terror of their vitality. We've manufactured our pickaninny toys with smiles too broad, we've donned blackface and shucked, jived, stuck bones in our hair and made nasty stereotypes out of every avenue towards black expression. With horror one realizes at a certain point in one's life that we've gone out of our way to make black people feel self-conscious for the simple, beautiful act of smiling. Slaves singing their spirituals in the fields, a source of solidarity and communion, turned to ash as we smeared our pale hands across it -- we have poisoned everything.
Race and sexuality carve different scars across us and across our worlds, but as a gay person I do have my own comprehension of what it means to be forced to channel such fundamental expressions of one's purest self through someone else's "respectable" place -- I have been trained to not kiss my loved one in public; from a young age the way I moved my hands, spoke a too sibilant "s" sound, was policed. Everybody had an opinion, a nudge here and there, toward the straight path. Rabid normality, manned by dogs. Communal expectations are totalitarian in their purest form -- to a sad many individuality upsets the airless boxes society's built itself up with; if we smash out their sides and let the people breathe the whole structure might collapse. Or so they say from their own individualized airless boxes, only their own reflections for company.
Steve McQueen's Lovers Rock, which is opening the New York Film Festival's 2020 edition tonight, feels like a repudiation of that all. While only seventy minutes long and just one-fifth of his five-part "Small Axe" series set to air on BBC and Amazon (two more chapters will screen later in the fest), taken on its own Lovers Rock is an explosion of sensation -- rhythm, color, sexuality and ecstatic movement for its own sake. Set across the span of a single night, a house party for the birthday of a woman in a dress so red it scorches the screen, McQueen turns one old house in London's West Indian community into a vibrating alive thing, its walls slick with golden sweat, all the better for the bodies to slide up and slam against in the spirit of jubilant unfettered celebration.
We meet several characters -- most notably there's Martha (a divine Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn), her friend Patty (Shaniqua Okwok), and the polyester-shirted handsome stranger (Micheal Ward) across the dance-floor -- but they're mostly there to sidle us from room to room, to give the emotional experience of this time and place, this night, its through-line. We get to know Martha the best and she's a stellar avatar, but for the majority of its runtime Lovers Rock becomes less about the specifics of individual experience and more about a community making a safe space for itself to exist, together, thrumming and alive, exuberant and beautiful. The vibrancy on the colors on display here, the tactility of the costumes and the flesh... it's a feast, I tell ya. White eyes do show up a couple of times, leering from the night's edges, only to reinforce how vital this space is -- it's like the dance scene from BlackkKlansman unbridled.
Although McQueen's more formal about it more than anything Lover's Rock made me think of Derek Jarman's recently discovered experimental, experiential film Will You Dance With Me?, which follows the man behind the camera for a night at the club, using first-person placement to drop us down into that headspace -- the room spinning, the music thumping, and an attractive stranger across the room keeps catching your eye... McQueen too captures moments of profound intimacy here, his camera grooving up against these people on the dance-floor, hip to hip to quivering molassas-shifting hip. There's been a conversation online as of late if filmmakers still know how to film eroticism... well, Steve McQueen has your answer right here.