Steve McQueen's latest film, WW2 epic Blitz, has been garnering Oscars buzz for some time – and for good reason. Saoirse Ronan shines as Rita, a mother who must wrench out her own heart by evacuating her young son George from London to ensure his safety. The real trouble begins, though, when George escapes by jumping off the train out of the city, and is intent on returning to his family.
The film sees Saoirse play a mother for the first time, a poignant connection created between herself and on-screen son Elliot Heffernan, particularly as he is a similar age to the age she was when she started out in the entertainment industry. There's a protectiveness and empathy between them that seems to transcend the wartime story their mother-and-son plotline takes place in.
But Blitz is much more than a story of mother and son – it is also one that champions the activism and empowerment women found during wartime. Much like Kate Winslet's Lee biopic – which explored the incredible life story of model-turned-WW2-photographer Lee Miller, it honours the crucial role women took in keeping the country going while the majority of men went off to fight in the war, and the battles they fought back home for better conditions and treatment.
Pretty early on, we see Rita and her friends working in a munitions factory, rallying together against the way they are treated in the workplace by their patronising (male) boss. The bond of sisterhood runs strong, though, as during a beautiful moment where Rita sings on a BBC radio programme to help lift morale, her and her friends rebel against the rules and use the public platform and chance to use their voices to campaign live on radio for tube stations to be used as shelters.
This was a huge wartime issue, with a 1924 directive ruling out the use of tube stations as shelters in the event of air raids. But as the reality of war kicked in once again, Londoners became more insistent about advocating for their safety.
The decision to show women fighting not just for their family's safety, but risking their jobs and livelihoods for their voices to be heard felt like a deliberate political act by McQueen to show the other side of the war effort – of the women holding things together back home.
The director confirmed that this was his intention during a post-screening Q&A for Blitz last Friday. “Half the war effort was women,” he said, adding that “it’s a choice how they’ve been portrayed [on screen] in the past”. He went on to describe women as “the emotional backbone of the country” during that time, and his subsequent aim of representing women's wartime stories as more than just “the girlfriend”. Hallelujah.
“They were keeping sh*t together,” he added, describing that for him, one of the highlights of making Blitz was having 400 women working on set, countering erasure from war stories in the past and ensuring such important representation when telling a story this epic during a period in history that is so well-known and tragic.
And it's not just women's stories and voices McQueen wanted to magnify. He also tackles the Black British wartime experience and the discrimination found there, portraying young George's experience of racism and bullying as well as wider divisions in society at that time. He even recreated for the screen a real-life racist conflict that happened in a London bomb shelter, to hammer home the lived experiences of so many people during that time – not to mention today.
The messages of both female empowerment and representation are woven into the fabric of the film, right down to smaller exchanges. For instance, one of Rita's friends tells a man who offers to buy her a drink in a bar that she can buy one herself – because she has a job. While the Second World War brought so much devastation, it also empowered so many women to live and work for themselves, and McQueen's decision to depict that feels downright empowering.
The director said on Friday, to much applause, “Why leave women out of WW2?” We couldn't agree more.
