Screenwriter Lena Waithe and director Melina Matsoukas achieve every shade of seriousness by means of elegant ease in their damnably deadly debut feature QUEEN & SLIM.
Out on a first time Tinder date that crackles with awkward forthrightness, a female lawyer and a male shoe salesman banter in a crummy diner.
She has had a crappy day after a client of hers has been sent to death row and no amount of flirting by him is going to raise her spirits. Driving her home they are pulled over by a policeman, a white man who clearly has a negative attitude to black people.
The tension in this scene is tangible, the mounting dread builds unrelentingly. The fearful and despicable situation that these two endure is palpable. When the officer draws and fires on the woman, the man grapples with the cop who is mortally wounded.
She urges them to flee and he reluctantly concedes. And so begins an odyssey causing the couple to unwittingly become a symbol of trauma, terror, grief and pain for people across the country, heartily sickened by the spate of hate homicides against black lives perpetrated by racist white police officers.
As they drive from Ohio, through Georgia, into Florida in a bid to cast off for Cuba, these two unlikely fugitives encounter an array of friends and foes, some indistinguishable, some helpful, some hostile, some impressionable, some unimpressed.
In these most dire and desperate of circumstances, these desperadoes forge a deep and powerful love and a celebrity that risks sealing their fate as much as rescuing them.
QUEEN & SLIM deals with the price of prejudice and the valuelessness of violence, a testimony to Black Lives Matter and witness to Black Deaths In Custody.
The world is out of joint and one of the many instruments that can serve the purpose of putting it right is the cinema. QUEEN & SLIM achieves a sophisticated level of lyrical poeticism letting images appear to perform a purely narrative function whilst leaving their symbolic meaning to either work on the subconscious or be exhumed by contemplation.