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‘Queen & Slim’ Could Be One of the Great Love Stories of All Time — if You Let It

The film is a rare portrayal of black people in our fullness — angry and frightened and hurt, euphoric and loving and free.

Credit...Photo illustration by Jon Key

By Carvell Wallace

    Nov. 21, 2019, 5:00 a.m. ET

The person I love and I were among the first members of the public to see the new film “Queen & Slim.” Early in September, we watched it alone on an upper floor of a nondescript office building in downtown San Francisco. It was a phenomenally isolating experience. We sat in a screening room accompanied by two affable white P.R. people and a black security guard who said nothing. The room was otherwise empty. It was 11 a.m.

The film begins at an Ohio diner, where two unnamed characters are on a Tinder date. The woman, played by Jodie Turner-Smith, is noticeably prickly. She takes issue with the waitress, the food, the atmosphere; she scoffs at her date’s decision to pray before eating. The man, played by Daniel Kaluuya, is generally unbothered, calmly dodging her barbs. He is patient about the waitress because he knows her troubles, having seen her in line at the Costco where he works. He chose the restaurant because it’s black-owned. He enthusiastically devours the salad she orders but finds unappetizing.

As they awkwardly pick their way through an underwhelming conversation, she reveals that she is a defense attorney and she’s upset because the state decided that very day to execute a client of hers. “Was he innocent?” Kaluuya asks. “Does it matter?” she fires back. “The state shouldn’t decide who lives or dies.”

In the car, they continue to spar, now with a little more playfulness. But just as we are beginning to see the romantic turn we have been trained to expect from movies, red and blue lights appear through the rear window. The man has changed lanes without signaling, and now they are being pulled over on a cold Cleveland night. Things very rapidly go down a dark path. The officer sees this couple entirely differently than we do. To us, Kaluuya prays over food, defends a waitress, is kind and patient. To the officer, he is a dark-skinned black man at night, one who isn’t showing the expected amount of deference. When Kaluuya asks if they can hurry up because he is cold, the officer loses it, pulls a gun, orders him on his knees. Turner-Smith gets out of the car, demanding a badge number. What happens next is a worst-case scenario in which she ends up with a bullet wound in her leg, the officer ends up lying dead in the snow and the two end up fugitives from justice. Kaluuya thinks they should turn themselves in. “The second you confess, you become property of the state,” Turner-Smith tells him. “Is that what you want?”

What began as a first date becomes an odyssey, in the Homeric sense. The two of them — Queen and Slim in the title, though they’re never actually called that in the film — try to travel thousands of miles to what they hope is freedom, meeting along the way a phalanx of regular black folks who help them, or disapprove of them, or pin their deepest spiritual hopes on them, all changing the way they understand themselves, each other and their lives.
Credit...CreditVideo by Universal Pictures

Black people protect them in bars, give them rides, stash them in bedrooms, play music for them in juke joints. In New Orleans, they stay with a relative played by Bokeem Woodbine: Queen’s Uncle Earl, a war veteran and an aging underworld figure whose only remaining power lies in the feeble dominion he holds over the house he shares with some women he may or may not be pimping. One of the women, played by Indya Moore, helps Queen remove her box braids so she’ll be less recognizable. The camera lingers on them in the intimate act of hairdressing; cool light fills the room. Queen breathes slowly, feeling protected for maybe the first time in the film. But the feeling of safety vanishes when a violent fight breaks out between Earl and one of the other women. The asylum these people have, in the world and even with one another, is always momentary. When the police come to check on the disturbance, Queen and Slim must bolt again, wearing whatever clothes they can grab from the house — a velour tracksuit for him, a tiger-striped minidress for her. They are no longer an attorney and a devout Christian. In some eyes, these outfits will make them beautiful, larger than life; in others, they will make them invisible, the kind of black people we are trained to look right through.

Video footage of their police confrontation, meanwhile, has gone viral, and their nightmare is made into a national cause. A photo of them, taken by an adoring kid, makes its way onto T-shirts and murals. In the media they become everything people want to make them into: black power, black revenge, black violence. None of it keeps them from being alone. A white couple hides them in a dark chamber beneath a bedroom floor, where they stay for hours, cramped and hidden, like passengers on an underground railroad, cargo packed in the dark hold of a ship. Slavery is never far from them. The choice between being free and becoming the state’s property began long before they became fugitives from the law. They drive through the American South, passing a prison work farm, chasing a freedom that is always farther ahead of them than death is behind them.
ImageDaniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith in “Queen & Slim.”
Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith in “Queen & Slim.”Credit...Universal Pictures

Their task, then, is to learn how to live a life, a full and loving life, wedged in the narrow space between captivity and death — a spiritual state of being that many black people in America understand in our souls, because those circumstances lie in wait around every corner and have for centuries.

I would say the film unfolded before us, but by the time it was over, it felt more accurate to say it had happened to us. We had no defense against its onslaught of fear, pain, hope, love, tragedy. When we left the screening room, we went to separate bathrooms to compose ourselves. I put my sunglasses on because I was bawling, my whole torso heaving. Two weeks earlier, I took a risk on some dicey food from the back of my fridge and rapidly wound up on my knees, racked and convulsing in a way that I hadn’t in years. Now, alone in the cold tile bathroom of a San Francisco office building after a film screening, I found myself in a nearly shot-for-shot remake of that experience. I felt the same way I had while submitting to illness: unable to keep a grip on the arbitrary state of normalcy, of not being in tears all the time. I needed to compose myself. I was, after all, at work. It felt like both an impossible task and an unfair one. How was I supposed to see what I had just seen and then go make professional small talk with the friendly young P.R. people who arranged the screening? They were white, and though they had seen what we just saw, we could not be sure that they had felt what we just felt.

Outside, the two of us wandered in a daze through the financial district until we found a place to sit down and breathe, on a curb in the courtyard of an office building. We could not talk, really. We smoked cigarettes and watched a man in a bright blue logoed polo shirt packing up the small tables people had been sitting at and sweeping up the trash they left behind, a black man laboring in an overwhelmingly white part of a mainly white city. We watched how people ignored him, a thing we may have noticed even more deeply because we felt invisible, too. We were carrying this movie with us. Everything the story meant. Everything it felt like. To be in love and to have that love so close to death. To be hated, hunted and afraid, to need to be fearless in order to survive. To know that loving someone, truly loving someone, means holding them while everything around you is falling — even pieces of you are falling — into an abyss. To know that nothing else can matter besides that kind of love. Surrounded by white people with badges on lanyards, button-up shirts and slacks, eating takeaway salads from plastic clamshells, we felt, together, so utterly alone.

Lately I have come to the conclusion, and you may disagree, that pretty much every experience we have moves us either toward life or away from it. There are some things that suck the life out of you, that make you feel smaller and less human, that alienate you from yourself; they calcify your fear and carve a monument out of your emptiness. Then there are those that bring you closer to life, that grow in you the desire to create, to nurture, to see beautiful things and become them. This is the love that increases your attachment to people and animals, makes you smile at children or go outside to see the moon. Every experience is either life-affirming or life-denying.

There is just one trick. It sometimes happens that to move toward love — true, active, life-affirming love — means to move toward death.

During the summer of 2018, I attended a protest. A black 18-year-old, Nia Wilson, had been killed in an attack on a BART-train platform in my hometown, Oakland. She had gotten off a train with her sisters when a white man charged at them with a knife and cut her throat. Many people feared the attack was racially motivated; there was a rumored gathering of the neofascist group the Proud Boys scheduled in the city that afternoon. A protest that had been planned in response quickly morphed into a vigil for Nia.

The gathering was markedly different from the climate marches and large-scale national rallies I had been to. This one was small. It was local. It was led by black people — not just black people but black folks, regular folks, not public figures or activist stars. It was as much an expression of grief as one of anger, though there was plenty of anger, too. I joined the group near the BART station where Nia was killed, and we marched downtown, stopping to rally where my son’s school meets with the gentrifying bars and ramen shops. Violence erupted in the back of the crowd when some white guys thought it would be a good idea to yell “White Lives Matter” at the crowd while Nia’s classmate was crying on the makeshift stage organizers had arranged on the back of a pickup. The response was quick and complete, a controlled unleashing of rage, mostly by men who knew enough about street life to finish the beat-down almost as soon as it began. Later I ran into a friend with a history of direct action and asked her if she had participated in the violence. “No,” she said gravely, quietly. “I’m here to witness.”

To witness was in fact one reason I was there. Cementing something in memory is one way of cementing it in the world. But I had another reason for going, too. My daughter was 12 on the day of Nia’s murder. She caught the train to school from the same BART station where Nia was killed. She called me that day in a panic, terrified and bereft and full of questions that I could not answer. Why did this happen to Nia? Why did this happen to black women? Why wouldn’t this happen to her? I had no answers. I could do only what parents do: promise to protect my child. So I told her that I would go into the streets — that hundreds, maybe thousands of us would go into the streets, and that we would be doing it for her. We would be doing it to show her that we would not let this happen.

It was tremendously important to me that my daughter stay home that evening, safe in her room, in her pajamas and slippers, watching Netflix, eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, texting with friends while we put our flesh on the hot downtown asphalt. No child should have to protect herself. It is our job to protect one another. And this is why I protested — not to make noise, or make change, but in order for the person who could not, should not be in the streets to see me, to see us all, as proof that she is not alone in caring for her life. To attend that protest was an act of love, an experience that brought me closer to life. But it was set against a backdrop of death.

For black people, Lena Waithe told me, death is always present. We were sitting in her home in Los Angeles, discussing her screenplay for “Queen & Slim.” “Black death is very interesting in that it is devastating, but at the same time, it illuminates us,” she said. She named Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Emmett Till, Fred Hampton and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Tupac Shakur and Nipsey Hussle — black figures whose deaths turned them into symbols, added tragic weight to their legacies. “Four little black girls minding their own business playing in the basement of a church shook the world,” she said, referring to the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. “You don’t want those little black girls to die, because who would want that? But if they didn’t, would we be as free as we are right now? There are so many sacrificial lambs in our past. It’s almost like black death is necessary to set us free. And I grapple with that. All the time. That’s why I think I had to write this.”

When I asked the director, Melina Matsoukas, if she thought “Queen & Slim” was a hopeful story, she replied almost immediately: “It’s a black story.” Rather than a dodge, this felt like a complete answer. In blackness, hope is often complicated by the intrusion of death, bloodshed, depression, incarceration, grief, brutality. You cannot — for the good of your family, your kids, your loved ones, yourself — keep your face fully toward the sun when you know the darkness is chasing you. In “Queen & Slim,” all good things are fleeting, and all love is set against bloodletting. The characters would like it to be otherwise, but they do not have a say.

“I wanted you just to look at them like: Huh, that’s me. That’s my mother, that’s my brother, that’s my sister, that’s my cousin,” Waithe told me. “I want you to live with them, I want you to be scared with them. I want you to fall in love with them.” The idea that we are supposed to identify with the characters on a screen is not new, but the idea that we — black people — are supposed to identify might still be. “White directors have been speaking their language for decades,” Waithe said. “We have to learn it, we have to find ourselves in that narrative.”

For Waithe, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, finding herself in that narrative meant studying television made by people like Aaron Sorkin and the creators of “Friends,” David Crane and Marta Kauffman. After years acting and writing in Los Angeles, she became the first black woman ever to win a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, for an episode of Aziz Ansari’s “Master of None” loosely based on her own experience of coming out to her mother. That episode was directed by Matsoukas, a woman of mixed heritage — Jamaican, Cuban, Jewish and Greek — who had spent a decade directing music videos for stars including Lady Gaga and Rihanna. (Her memorable video for Beyoncé’s “Formation,” with its stylistic mixture of documentary and fantasy, arrived at the height of Black Lives Matter and, to many, deftly synthesized the visual power of the movement; its look echoes in “Queen & Slim.”) Matsoukas describes the film as not just about black love onscreen but also about the sisterly love of the two women who came together to make it. “We can be a power,” she told me of the faith she has in her artistic relationship with Waithe. “Trust is really important,” she said. “Probably the only way I survive.”

“Queen & Slim” holds its cinematic influences for all to see. It is tempting to compare it to both “Bonnie & Clyde” and “Thelma & Louise,” as the title’s syntax seems to invite. Visually, Matsoukas says that she was inspired by “Belly,” another cinematic debut by a music-video director turned filmmaker, Hype Williams — its gritty, ever-moving camera, its flashes of light and color. And Waithe lists among her influences films like “Set It Off” and “Love Jones,” both part of a 1990s wave that had dozens of black filmmakers telling stories that felt unaffected by the white gaze — the same movies that my cousins and I watched over and over on lazy summer days, memorizing every line, partly because they were about us and partly because there were so few of them.
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Larenz Tate and Nia Long in “Love Jones” (1997).
Larenz Tate and Nia Long in “Love Jones” (1997).Credit...Addis Wechsler Pictures/Getty Images

It would appear that we are in the midst of another such moment in black film. When Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight” won the Best Picture Oscar in 2017, it seemed to mark the complete arrival of a new wave of films telling emotionally complex black stories: Ava DuVernay’s “Selma” bringing striking intimacy to what could have been another “great man” biopic, Ryan Coogler’s “Fruitvale Station” patiently watching quiet moments in the life of a young black man before he becomes a hashtag, Jenkins’s “If Beale Street Could Talk” lingering and meditating on black beauty. These may be the films a new generation of young black people watches over and over, looking for a way to understand and name their experience.

But of that ’90s wave, it’s “Love Jones” that is a particularly clear antecedent to the romantic purity of Waithe and Matsoukas’s story — so much so that it’s referenced in both the script and the soundtrack for “Queen & Slim.” It is a straightforward love story about two young artists in Chicago’s black poetry scene. When they are finally reunited after a year apart, on a rainy street, in a setting taken directly from the great romances of the 1940s, she asks why he’s so urgent about everything. His answer is a line I think about often. “I love you,” he responds. “That’s urgent like a mother” — here he uses a perfect but unprintable word for emphasis. The exigency of his love, the blackness of his phrasing: Together, they are simply beautiful to me. I have never stopped gaining new understanding of what, exactly, those two things mean when they are together. Maybe it sticks with me because it was one of the first times I learned that in American cinema, it was possible to be both fully black and fully consumed in love.
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Blair Underwood and Jada Pinkett in “Set It Off” (1996).
Blair Underwood and Jada Pinkett in “Set It Off” (1996).Credit...New Line Cinema/Getty Images

When I first met the person I love, it was not on a date; it was because mutual friends thought we might have something to talk about. She was, that summer, in the midst experiencing the death of her father in her home. I nursed my own mother to her death in my arms almost 10 years earlier. When we talked about these things, we were honest and unafraid: We had each seen the worst, so what was there to fear? She no longer cared, she said, about anything but connecting with people she could trust; that was all that mattered.

For nearly a year and a half before this, I had been taking a break from serious dating. I was trying to understand my own history of disastrous relationships and see where I had gone wrong. I had tried to please impossible people, hidden parts of myself from others, agreed to things I didn’t want — all because I was afraid, deathly afraid, of the pain of being hurt. I had filled my life with people who themselves were desperately terrified of being deeply seen. But love is seeing. And something about this new person’s certainty about that fact, her unwillingness to lie about who she was or what she wanted, reached me, at a time when I was fiercely nurturing the same quality in myself. And I found that much of the fear I was so used to was gone; I had nothing to pretend, nothing to hide.

Still, sometimes, when I catch myself falling into old habits of fear, I think not about my old relationships or lessons learned but about the look on my mother’s face in her last moments. It was a look I had never seen on her, a quiet combination of surprise and resignation. And I remember that the time we spend here with one another is, in fact, urgent, because it is only a flicker, and in the end we all lose everything. So why be afraid? The price of admission for such a simple act of presence with another person was the intimate knowledge of suffering, pain, mortality. Even when it’s not a nation’s violence that’s threatening you, even when you are not running for your freedom, you may still learn: The price of love is nothing short of death.

One resounding image of “Queen & Slim” is that photograph of the couple, now fugitives, taken by a young admirer. They are on the hood of a car they’ve borrowed from Uncle Earl, wearing the clothes they got from the New Orleans underworld. Slim looks at the camera, daring you to see him, resplendent in the velour of his misfit tracksuit. Queen looks at him, her legs bending awkwardly in snakeskin boots, perhaps seeing her love for him for the first time. The image is a record that they were here. That they lived. No matter what happens to them — no matter how the world paints them, vilifies them, maims them — they were here, and at least for a moment, they owned their own lives.

What makes this a black movie is not just that it’s about black people or that it was made by black people. It is a black movie because it is first and foremost about loving black people, loving us in every way and however we are — when we are angry, when we are frightened, when we are kind and when we are hurting. It is easy to love us when we are dead, our emotions suspended in history like a bug trapped in amber. This film loves us when we are alive. And that is a love that our country denies us, seemingly compulsively. When we are making culture or sports or funny memes we are embraced, but when we are hurt or grieving, angry or frightened, we are out of line. “Queen & Slim” loves us simply by seeing black people in our completeness. One of the most potent aspects of the relationship between its two leads is that he never asks her to change herself. When she is prickly, when she is aggressive, when she is reticent, when she is open, when she is distant, he does not police or lecture her. He allows her anger, makes space for her hurt. Isn’t this what love is? To see a person clearly, honestly, and to be willing to bend yourself toward that person?

But to quote a song by the Ghanaian Highlife legend Ebo Taylor, “Love and death walk/Hand in hand.” It is no accident that the first time the characters in this film consummate their passions, it is intercut with images of a protest where blood is spilled in their names. Black joy is fleeting, and all peace is stolen, for a time, from the ceaseless encroachment of brutality. “I’m not a criminal,” Slim tells Queen when she first advises him to run. “You are now,” she rebuts. This is what they are living against together, a world that wants everything from black people except our truth. And so it is also an act of love to make yourself beautiful and vulnerable, enchanting and free, to steal back your soul. It’s when Queen and Slim are on the run that they find they can do anything — challenging each other to stop and dance, to ride a horse, to hang from a car window, to be purely alive.

The second time I saw the film, it was an entirely different scene from that first screening. It was a star-studded event at Los Angeles’s black-owned Underground Museum in October. Outside the door was everything you’d expect from a Los Angeles screening: people trying to get in, harried checking of guest lists, a parade of S.U.V.s and luxury cars. We watched the movie in the courtyard behind the museum with what seemed like all of the city’s beautiful black people, a sea of bold hats, custom-made jackets, tall and ostentatious boots. Solange Knowles gave an introduction. I was standing in the back, thinking this looked just like a brunch scene from the HBO series “Insecure,” when Y’lan Noel — who plays Daniel King on that show — politely asked me to move so he could find his way to a seat.

The crowd handily overran the number of chairs set out, and I joined an overflow contingent sitting on blankets hastily laid near the screen. Just before the film began, a D.J. was spinning a set of classic hip-hop and R.&B. hits. As the lights dimmed and the music faded, we were in the middle of Anita Baker’s “Caught Up in the Rapture,” a song that — just like “Love Jones” and “Set It Off” — my family played so often that its words live permanently in my soul. “We stand side by side/Till the storms of life pass us by,” Baker sings in her shimmering contralto. “I want you in my life for all time.” Even after the lights had gone dark and the song vanished, a woman behind me kept on singing the lyrics, just loud enough for those around her to hear; for a moment, her voice was the only sound among us.

From my spot in front, I could look back and watch everyone else watch the movie. I was struck, as the film progressed, by the way the people in the audience transformed from celebrities and Hollywood types to something not unlike children at a firefly-filled summer-camp movie night. They were gasping along with the characters, laughing raucously, booing and hissing at bad guys, yelling out at the screen. In their faces I saw the film that had devastated me when we were alone become a shared story, exquisite entertainment, when we were together. When a police helicopter passed overhead, a stunningly regular occurrence in Los Angeles, we simply looked up and then back to the screen.

Assembling a crowd of black people, making them forget their jobs and their celebrity, making them laugh and weep and hiss and sing aloud the words of their mothers’ favorite songs — this is a form of love. So is making a film alongside someone you trust so deeply that you can pull the work from your soul. In this movie, “we see ourselves,” Waithe told me at one point. “It’s like eating food from your childhood. I kept trying to find cereal on a Saturday morning, your grandmother’s cornbread.” This film is a love story — a story about seeing and paying attention to love, to blackness, to our moments even as they are slipping away.

One of the film’s most remarkable sequences takes place in a juke joint on the road to Georgia where the couple have paused their running. In the middle of the dance floor, as the music plays, they hold on to each other in a slow, swaying pose that could be either dancing or weeping in each other’s arms. The camera lingers not only on them but also on the old folks around them, laughing and drinking and nodding in time to the music, giving us persistent looks into black faces, looks that are both intimate and infinite. “I want a guy ... to show me scars I never knew I had,” we hear Queen say, in a voice-over. “But I don’t want him to make them go away,” she continues. “I want him to cherish the bruises they leave behind.” “Someone that’s gonna hold my hand and never let it go,” Slim later replies. “She gotta be special though, ’cause she gonna be my legacy.”

This is the spiritual center of the film. In this exchange love is presented against wounds and against time. That they are running both away from and into all these things is exactly the point.

If you allow it to be, “Queen & Slim” can be one of the great love stories of all time. Which means it should be for everyone to see. We all watch and have watched for the entirety of our lives movies about loving white people. Why shouldn’t everyone else do the same for us?