Steve McQueen‘s Blitz (Apple, 11.1 in theatres) has just been announced as the closing-night attraction for the 2024 New York Film Festival — Thursday, 10.10, Alice Tully Hall.
McQueen’s film is principally a mother-son relationship drama set against the ghastly German bombing of England, generally known as The Blitz, which began on or about 9.7.40 and lasted until 5.11.41.
There’s a sentence within NYFF Biitz page that gives me concern: “McQueen’s dazzling film offers a multicultural portrait of 1940s London, [one] too infrequently seen on screens.”
A “multicultural” London in 1940 and ’41 suggests that the film includes POC cast members other than just Eliott Heffernan, who plays George, the nine-year-old son of Saoirse Ronan‘s Rita, a working-class gal.
It’s one thing to consider the idea of Rita, a white woman, giving birth to a light-skinned POC son in the city that London was 93 years ago (1931). Life is always full of oddities and exceptions, of course, but this is obviously a stretch by historical social standards.
According to Wikipedia, in 1939 (a year before the bombing began) the total population of England was something in the vicinity of 38,084,321.
An IWM (Imperial War Museums) web page states that “before the first American troops arrived in 1942, the black population of Britain [was] around 8,000 to 10,000 people.” Let’s call it ten rather than eight.
In other words, in 1939 England there was one person of color for every 3800 palefaces. And yet two years after the start of the worldwide Great Depression with everyone scraping to survive, Ronan’s Rita zeroed in and mated with a POC fella within a nearly all-white culture that didn’t shirk from racist sentiments.
Okay, perhaps she adopted George but why?
I’m sorry but how can a rational, semi-informed moviegoer not conclude that casting-wise Blitz sounds like another case of presentism?
