One can commend Steve McQueen for making something as radical as “Occupied City,” but it doesn’t mean we have to sit through all 266 minutes of it. This film is a CHORE to behold.
McQueen’s decision to incorporate no talking-head interviews or archival footage is certainly a bold decision. Instead, he opts to tell his story via the illustrated book “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945)” by Dutch author-director Bianca Stigter, who is McQueen’s partner.
The film tackles a whopping 130 local Amsterdam addresses to the voice of a female narrator. These are harrowing stories that can also veer towards the banal ebb and flow of life.
McQueen pairs footage of the city’s recent anti-COVID-lockdown protests with narration about the city’s anti-Nazi resistance. One could easily conflate the two. Is he trying to imply that oppression came back to Amsterdam?
The narrator, Melanie Hyams, also tells stories of the war crimes that took place at these locations during WWII. It’s mixed in with 35mm footage of the same locations, but set in 2020, when the people were forced to abide by the first city-wide curfew since World War II.
The never-ending runtime, a patience-tester, doesn’t amount to much except for McQueen’s clinical dissection of the minutiae details. There’s no payoff. The emotions are actually subdued, which begs one to ask what A24 will actually do with this project, which shouldn’t be met as a four-hour film but rather an art installation fit for a museum.