Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-
Music: A-

So here we get the second of the “five films” that make up the Amazon Original series Small Axe, all of them purportedly about the history of Black experience in England. Just as was the case with last week’s Mangrove, the characters are either Caribbean immigrants, or the children of said immigrants. There’s a curious difference in storytelling, however, wherein last week’s first installment was very much a clear-cut feature-length film at 124 minutes; and this week’s “film” is all of 68 minutes in length, and is much more episodic in both presentation and tone.

It fascinates me that the critical consensus is even more positive for this piece than for Mangrove—which got a rating of 90 at MetaCritic, and this one gets a whopping 95. That puts both of them in their “Must-See” category, and while I won’t dispute that per se, I also won’t be quite as likely to tell people they have to see this one. Then again, to what degree is any one of these meant to stand alone, anyway? They may be called films, but it’s still a series, after all. Granted, they are also not sequels: each film has its own distinct set of characters.

And that’s sort of the thing with Lovers Rock: its characters are comparatively far less distinct. Nearly the entire run time is set at a West London house party in the eighties, director Steve McQueen’s camera lingering, for one extended shot after another, on a thick crowd of Carribean people dancing. I will say this much: Lovers Rock is packed to the gills with fantastic music. Many songs are featured, most of them some variation of reggae but also included are disco, and one particularly prominent track: “Silly Games,” a 1979 single by Janet Kay. That song’s genre, according to wikipedia? “Lovers rock”—apparently a more romantic style of reggae which enjoyed popularity specifically in London in the seventies. I knew none of this. I learned something new today.

And that illustrates the unfortunate issue with my even trying to approach this film with any kind of standard critical eye, actually: I’m an American white guy who was born in the seventies. When it comes to this stuff, what the fuck do I know? I can only assume this film speaks in particular to those who have a life experience with a kind of specificity represented here. To McQueen’s credit, this film does offer a window into this world for outsiders like myself. It’s a fully realized world for sure; I don’t have to fully understand it to see that much.

Lovers Rock is also not much concerned with plot, however. More than anything, it’s an extended vignette, a portrait of a world within a world at a particular time. McQueen does touch on a few dark sides of this world, usually with a subtle hand, such as when Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) walks out into the street after a friend leaving the party, and a group of white guys down the street start making monkey noises at her. This is one of only two times white people are even noticed in the movie. The vast majority of the time, we’re just watching people dancing in the house party, almost like an extended music video.

After some time, Martha is revealed to be the primary character here. She intervenes in a sexual assault taking place in the house’s backyard. She and the man she meets at the party, Franklin (Micheal Ward), are the only two seen in a brief sequence the following morning. We do meet another volatile character in the form of Martha’s cousin Clifton (Kedar Williams-Stirling), a brief and tense conversation between them being the only limited amount of back story given to anyone in the movie.

Even that doesn’t happen until about halfway through. When Lovers Rock begins, we see handheld cameras following several guys moving furniture around, setting up for the party. There are women in the kitchen cooking, and they break out into song, the lyrics later revealed to be from the aforementioned “Silly Games.” Later when the DJ plays it for characters to dance to—McQueen’s camera lingering for quite some time on one couple grinding their groins together sensuously to it—and after several verses, the music stops, but the whole crowd just continues dancing and singing the lyrics on their own, belting it out passionately. It goes on so long it almost gets uncomfortable.

I know people who would watch Lovers Rock and find it repetitive and dull. I felt a little too far removed from its world for it to speak to me specifically, but I still found I could appreciate it. It was always compelling, if occasionally mystifying. In the end, we are told it’s “For the lovers and the rockers.” These are specific kinds of lovers and rockers, maybe not quite the conventional definition many of us have for those words today. If nothing else, Lovers Rock is a great example of how specific representation can still be accessible. The more a piece of art tries to be everything to all people, the more bland and pointless it becomes. This is a film that does not have that problem and is better for it.

*Dancing to their own beat: lovers and rockers.*

Overall: B