Review: Small Axe: Lovers Rock (2020)

Like a song with rising lyrics and an irresistible beat, Lovers Rock stretches and swells, capturing the tension and release of music, love—life in general. The second installment in Small Axe, Steve McQueen’s anthology of films for the BBC about West Indian life in London in the 1960s through 1980s, Lovers Rock is mostly plotless. It’s set at an all-night reggae party at a suburban boarding house in West London in 1980 and foregoes narrative conflicts, main characters, and thematic tidiness. Instead, it mostly moves to the music, showing the ecstasy, anxiety, and passion of a community of young, Black people rise and fall over the course of a magical evening.

Most of the film takes place on the dance floor, a cosy bedroom transformed into a space of swaying, sweating bodies grooving to the music of reggae hits from the time period. There are characters we spend more time with than others, such as Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) and Franklyn (Micheal Ward), strangers who strike up a tentative romance on the dance floor, but there is no structural arc to the film aside from the temporal arc of one night. At times, McQueen completely ignores the faces of the people in the frame, instead showing their hips, their feet, and their hands embracing each other. In the film’s most stunning shot, McQueen weaves together a sequence of hands reaching out to pull others onto the dance floor. The camera floats at hip level and swings across the floor, as if it too is moving to the beat of the music. We see hands reach out and find partners to hold in close, sensual embrace as the music brings them together and brings the house alive.

There is a beautiful release in the film’s depiction of freedom on the dance floor—freedom from the worries of the world outside, from parents, bosses, the police, and, yes, white society. But if you’ve heard that Lovers Rock is a fantasia of Black freedom, you’re mistaken. The film is too rife with tension to qualify as an idealized dream, because, as in music, without tension there is no release. Here we have the joy and sexual energy of the dance floor, and the promise that comes with it, but we also have jealousy and frustration.

Some white boys linger outside the home, threatening the sanctuary with sneers and racist taunts. Inside the home, individual men threaten the freedom of the women, in one case forcing himself on the birthday girl who set up the party only to be thwarted at the last moment by Martha discovering them. There’s also the threat of chaos that comes with freedom—in the final shots of the dance floor before the camera leaves the party behind, we watch the men (they’ve seemingly banished women from the dance floor at this point) writhe and wail to the party beats, growing more incensed, shedding their shirts, starting to pound their feet and wave their arms, letting out their anxieties, yes, but also threatening sheer chaos in the process.

Lovers Rock is beautiful for its totalizing atmosphere, where you feel like you can smell the sweat, touch the bodies, and feel the beat in your hips while watching. It’s especially appealing as it celebrates touch in a year where distance is the norm. But it’s also dancing on the edge of danger, like any magical moment in life. Turn one wrong corner, say one wrong word, take one wrong step, and the dance can be ruined and the magic dispelled. That’s the beauty of the beat: you have to stay in rhythm or you’re no longer making music.

8 out of 10

Small Axe: Lovers Rock (2020, UK/USA)

Directed by Steve McQueen; written by Steve McQueen and Courttia Newland; starring Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn, Micheal Ward, Kedar Williams-Stirling, Shaniqua Okwok, Ellis George.

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