Lovers Rock review: Revelry is radical at Steve McQueen's rapturous house party

Micheal Ward and Amarah-Jae St Aubyn play a young couple who meet at a house party
BBC/McQueen Limited/Parisa Taghizadeh
Charlotte O'Sullivan20 October 2020

It’s not officially a musical, but Steve McQueen’s film is so saturated with song and dance that the glove fits. And if we can agree on that, can I be the first to call it the musical of the year?

Lovers Rock, like McQueen’s other LFF offering, Mangrove, is rooted in Ladbroke Grove. Mangrove’s Trinidadian-British hero, Frank, fights for the right to party, which brings him into conflict with an abusive state. Here, a group of Black teens, steeped in Caribbean culture, just want to have fun, but through McQueen’s lens, that revelry is radical.

It’s 1980 and Martha (newcomer Amarah-Jae St Aubyn; luminous) and her best friend Patty (Shaniqua Okwok) arrive at a house party cum birthday bash. They receive lots of attention from the men, which aggravates the birthday girl, Cindy (Ellis George), who has her eye on smooth-talking Franklyn (Micheal Ward; wonderfully restrained). Eventually, Martha and Franklyn pair off (though an ugly incident will confirm how loyal Martha is to other women) and the couple stick with each other till morning.

We feel involved in Martha and Franklyn’s story. The characters are SO sexy. But it’s the party itself that commands attention and it’s on the dance floor that McQueen executes his most libidinous and audacious moves.

Amarah-Jae St Aubyn and Shaniqua Okwok
BBC/McQueen Limited/Parisa Taghizadeh

In one stand-out sequence, dancing couples who’ve been murmuring along to Janet Kay’s Silly Games are unfazed when the music stops. In a kind of blissed-out trance, they carry on singing the song themselves, their shoes setting the beat on the wooden floor. The mood is uncannily similar to a scene in Regina King’s One Night in Miami, where audiences at a Sam Cooke concert manage just fine without a sound system by cleaving together, “ordinary” Black folk protect the vibe. Both Lovers Rock and One Night in Miami, one could argue, despite being set in the past, capture the zeitgeist of 2020. Leaders are great, but power comes from the people.

Another highlight involves a rapturous dance-off between by high-as-a-kite men. The camera, swooping between the bodies, is constantly on the go (director of photography, Shabier Kirchner, must be super-fit). None of this leaping around leads to a dramatic crisis, which is what makes it so original. As in an Andy Warhol movie, plot is superfluous. But where Warhol celebrates inertia, McQueen’s all about drive.

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Spliffs, here, are a galvanising force, as are tracks by the likes of Augustus Pablo (Minstral Pablo) and The Revolutionaries (Kunta Kinte Dub).

The BBC co-funded this project. With a new chairman about to be selected, there’s much talk about what we need from the Beeb. That’s easy: more films as mind- and loin-blowing as Lovers Rock.

Lovers Rock airs on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on November 22 as part of Steve McQueen's anthology series Small Axe.

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