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critic’s pick

‘Queen & Slim’ Review: Love on the Run

Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith star in Melina Matsoukas’s dreamy but intense outlaw romance.

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‘Queen & Slim’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Melina Matsoukas narrates a sequence from her film featuring Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya.

Hi, I’m Melina Matsoukas. I’m the director of ‘Queen and Slim’ and also one of the producers. This scene is when Daniel Kaluuya, who plays Slim, and Queen, Jodie Turner-Smith, first fall in love. It represents their second date, but also a moment that they are so determined to have because they might not make it to the end. They may not be afforded another chance to dance, to connect, and ultimately, to fall in love. “Oh, I don’t drink.” “Maybe you should start.” The space is a juke joint, but it represents for them a safe haven, a place where they are connected. Thus, I named it The Underground after The Underground Railroad. I’ve always thought of their journey as representing a reverse slave escape narrative as they are black fugitives running from the north traveling south. They are protected here in the womb of their community, and they utilize this fleeting moment of safety to connect, and ultimately, to fall in love for the first time. The production design of the space was modeled after the photography of Birney Imes, who photographed the deep south. And he has a book on juke joints that I modeled some of the design after. But I also modeled it after these beautiful hand-painted landscapes that mark many shelters in Jamaica, particularly outside of Kingston on my favorite beach called Hellshire Beach. I wanted the design to speak to the black diaspora as well as the American South and all the subtle ways in which the black community is connected. [MUSIC PLAYING] The scene was scripted as if it was meant to be their first dance at their wedding. I remembered the feeling of watching ‘West Side Story,’ one of my favorite films. And when Tony sees and dances with Maria for the first time, how they’re in this bubble shutting the world out around them. And I wanted Queen and Slim to feel the same way in that moment. Another reference for this scene was ‘In the Mood for Love.’ I wanted them to feel shrouded in that love and in that light and the color and in these languid, poetic moments in a similar way as Wong Kar-wai was so beautifully able to paint in his film. We also used Steadicam to dance with the actors. We had set up the space so we could see and rotate 360 without seeing ourselves or equipment as I wanted the camera to feel like part of the choreography. I wanted to use these long, languid shots to pull you into this moment. This is also one of the few times we used a few slow motion shots. It was important to make this moment somewhat surreal so as to mirror the feeling you get when you’re lost in love and the world’s slowing down around you. There’s no one else in the room as they dance, not literally, but figuratively. The music drops out and we bring in for the first time this beautifully composed theme which represents their love. We call it the ‘Love Theme’ and it was composed by our amazing composer, Dev Hynes. [MUSIC - DEV HYNES, ‘LOVE THEME’] “What do you want?” “I want a guy to show me myself. I want him to love me so deeply I’m not afraid to show him how ugly I can be. I want him to show me scars I never knew I had.” It was a choice I made in the edit to take their words from the next scene and lay them over this first dance so it’s as if you can feel and hear her thoughts as she’s experiencing them in real time. “And I want him to cherish the bruises they leave behind.” And as the song ends and the people around them cheer the bands, it’s as if they are applauding their love. This takes them back into real time and they leave together, connected and as one for the first time in their story. [CHEERING] [MUSIC - DEV HYNES, ‘LOVE THEME’] “We should go.”

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Melina Matsoukas narrates a sequence from her film featuring Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya.CreditCredit...Andre D. Wagner/Universal Pictures
Queen & Slim
NYT Critic’s Pick
Directed by Melina Matsoukas
Drama
R
2h 12m

“I’m an excellent lawyer,” Queen says to Slim, at a time in their brief acquaintance when legal skills seem both urgently needed and wholly irrelevant.

Slim is not impressed. “Why do black people always have to be excellent?” he asks. “Why can’t we just be normal?”

The question has a special poignancy at the moment he asks it. Before everything went haywire, he and Queen — whose given names we learn only at the very end of the movie, via a news broadcast — were in the middle of a perfectly, depressingly normal evening.

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Daniel Kaluuya, left, and Jodie Turner-Smith in “Queen & Slim.”Credit...Universal Pictures

“Queen & Slim,” the debut feature by the music-video and television virtuoso Melina Matsoukas (written by Lena Waithe), starts out as a restrained comedy of romantic disappointment. The title pair — played by the British actors Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya — are in a diner after connecting on a dating app, and the lack of chemistry is palpable. She seems impatient and distracted. He seems sincere and friendly, but maybe also a little basic. They get into his car, a nondescript white sedan with a license plate that reads “TRUSTGOD.” It’s a cold night in Cleveland, and a second date is unlikely.

God and the filmmakers have other plans. A lethal encounter with an aggressive white police officer (the country singer Sturgill Simpson) changes everything. The non-couple turn into fugitives, and “Queen & Slim” becomes an outlaw romance. Hailed in the film as “the black Bonnie and Clyde,” Queen and Slim evoke other storied movie duos too, like Butch and Sundance and Thelma and Louise. In the course of their flight — from Ohio to New Orleans and across the South toward Florida — they become folk heroes. They also fall in love.

“I’m not a criminal,” Slim protests, early in the journey. It’s the flip side of his earlier complaint about excellence. The world wants him to be either a paragon or a pariah, denying his individuality, his specific dreams and desires. That’s the beautiful, terrible paradox of this movie: only as its heroes are driven to extremes of desperation, courage and resilience do they experience passions and pleasures that might have been part of ordinary life.

“Queen & Slim” is full of violence and danger, but it isn’t a hectic, plot-driven caper. Its mood is dreamy, sometimes almost languorous, at least as invested in the aesthetics of life on the run as it is in the politics of black lives. Not that the two are separable. The image of Queen and Slim that is reproduced on protest T-shirts and murals shows them striking stylized poses in borrowed clothes, leaning against the vintage Pontiac that carries them on the second half of their journey.

The car belongs to Queen’s Uncle Earl (Bokeem Woodbine), who lives in New Orleans in a polyamorous arrangement that might also be a moneymaking operation. An Iraq war veteran with a complicated past, he is one of a handful of vivid characters we meet along the way. Dashcam images of what happened in Ohio have gone viral, stripping Queen and Slim of anonymity and turning every encounter into a tense guessing game. Will this person help us out? Turn us in? Rip us off?

The answers are sometimes comical — Slim’s attempt to rob a gas station, for example — sometimes terrifying, and sometimes both at once, and they don’t emerge in simple black and white. Racism in America can be stark and brutal, but it isn’t always simple. People who look like allies turn out to be enemies, and vice versa. Ironies and contradictions abound, even as some of the basic facts assert themselves with blunt, oppressive force.

Queen and Slim’s goal is to find a pilot who will fly them to Cuba, a destination that links them to the history of black radicalism. Their drive along the back roads of Alabama and Georgia is propelled by a soundtrack that is equally history-minded, with deep hip-hop and R&B selections strung along Devonté Hynes’s mood-altering score. The music mirrors the film’s album-like structure. Even as the plot moves forward in a straight line, its episodes have their own shape and integrity.

Not every cut is a classic. A burst of violence, indirectly connected to Queen and Slim, feels jarring and overwrought, especially because of the way it’s intercut with a sex scene — a mash-up that produces more cacophony than intensity. A bit of back story involving Queen and Uncle Earl is similarly ill-considered. The film fumbles some of its big gestures and over-italicizes a few statements. What lingers, though, are strains of anger, ardor, sorrow and sweetness, and the quiet astonishment of witnessing the birth of a legend. This movie feels like something new, and also as if it’s been around forever, waiting for its moment.

Queen & Slim

Rated R. Love and death. Running time: 2 hours 12 minutes.

A.O. Scott is the co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Love Simmers Inside a Cauldron. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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