Lovers Rock is a work of freedom. Freedom from narrative, freedom from main characters, freedom from whiteness, freedom from discrimination. It’s about creating a space to dance, flirt, argue, smoke, breathe.
This is especially true considering that Lovers Rock is the second installment in Steve McQueen’s five-film anthology, Small Axe, set among London’s Caribbean community. The first chapter, Mangrove, chronicled the police harassment—nearly to the point of unjust imprisonment—of the owner and patrons of a Caribbean restaurant in 1968. If Mangrove showed the desecration of a communal space and spirit, Lovers Rock—which takes place in 1980 over the course of a single London house party—reclaims and celebrates both. Following Mangrove, it feels restorative and jubilant.
It’s also unconventional. Mangrove evolved into a fairly standard courtroom drama; an ensemble piece, but one with clear protagonists. In Lovers Rock, which is written by McQueen and Courttia Newland, we get to know a few characters better than others, but only because McQueen and cinematographer Shabier Kirchner’s roving camera happens to linger on them longer. Indeed, the main character is that camera, the way it observes—in a series of lovely edits—various hands reaching out to elbows and waists, inviting women to the dance floor. Or the way it settles into the midst of the melee with an extended single take when the men take over for a raucous rouser. Or slowly circles the entire room in woozy rhythm with the music, the clasping couples, the weed.
You could also say the main character is the music (the title refers to a slow-groove, romantic subgenre of reggae that emerged in England in the 1970s). Mercury Sound, the DJ group running the party (and slyly shouting their own name throughout), play a few familiar standards from the period, but the movie’s spirit is best captured by “Silly Games,” a piercingly yearning 1979 hit, written by Dennis Bovell and sung by Janet Kay, that we hear in a couple of variations. At one point, late in the party, the DJ turns off the sound during “Silly Games” and the couples continue singing a cappella for nearly 10 minutes. In this instant, Lovers Rock creates a bubble of freedom that nothing can pierce.
That’s not to say Lovers Rock depicts an idyll. There are threats from outside—racial epithets on the street, a passing police cruiser—and within, including a partier who’s revealed to be a predator. But these are used as potent counterpoints—reminders of why this party, at its best, is something precious. I’ll remember many of the people we meet—Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn), a church girl seeking her own sort of freedom; Franklyn (Micheal Ward), who tries to woo her with an amazing, geometric-patterned shirt that could be its own character; Samson (Kadeem Ramsay), the most spirited of Mercury Sound’s record-spinners. But my favorite might be Clifton (Kedar Williams-Stirling), who scrounges enough change to get into the party by breaking open a nearby phone booth. Finally on the dance floor, he unburdens himself with a whirling, lurching routine that’s beautiful and bombastic. Clifton’s dance is perhaps the movie’s most exuberant expression of freedom, its ecstatic reason for being.
