As a female British film-maker of Ghanaian heritage, the director Amma Asante broke several glass ceilings when her third feature, A United Kingdom, opened the London film festival in October. With an awards-worthy, powerhouse performance by producer/star David Oyelowo – whose brilliant portrayal of Martin Luther King in 2014’s Selma was overlooked at the “so white” Oscars – A United Kingdom also chimed with the launch of the BFI’s Black Star season, a programme “celebrating the range, versatility and power of black actors”.
Yet watching the film for a second time with a packed audience who swooned at its romance, laughed at its wry humour and cheered its moments of triumph, it struck me that, for all its progressive importance, this is first and foremost an impressively crowd-pleasing piece of intelligent screen entertainment. Its true-life tale of unity in the face of cultural apartheid and political expediency remains as relevant as ever in these divided times, but it is Asante’s talent for making the personal political – and vice versa – that is the real story here. Her position as one of the UKs most accessibly agitating film-makers is confirmed.
Eye in the Sky screenwriter Guy Hibbert’s screenplay (from Susan Williams’s 2006 book Colour Bar) revisits an often forgotten chapter of postwar history that might be filed under “stranger than fiction”. Rosamund Pike is Ruth Williams, a clerk from Blackheath, south London, working in Lloyds of London in 1947, who is swept off her feet by handsome law student Seretse Khama (Oyelowo). Ruth doesn’t know that Seretse is an African king in waiting, leader-to-be of the Bamangwato people of Bechuanaland (later Botswana), the British protectorate to which he is due to return on completion of his studies.
When Seretse proposes, having duly explained his true identity, Ruth imagines a new life away from the misty drizzle of London, a life that, she assures her fiance, will be taken “moment by moment – together”. But when the news of this high-profile black-and-white union reaches neighbouring South Africa, whose National party is busy enshrining apartheid in law, the cash-strapped British authorities move first to forbid and then to undermine the marriage, scared of alienating their supplier of cheap gold and uranium. Seretse’s regent uncle, Tshekedi Khama (Vusi Kunene), also refuses to countenance a white queen and a rift develops that threatens to tear apart more than just love.
Handsomely shot on locations in the UK and Botswana by Sam McCurdy, A United Kingdom contrasts sweeping exteriors with fusty interiors, breathing rich visual life into the battle between an entrenched establishment and an emerging republic. Production designer Simon Bowles and composer Patrick Doyle clearly relish the broad canvas opportunities of the narrative, while Asante cites Richard Attenborough and David Lean as her guiding lights.
For all the film’s vibrant grandeur, though, our attention is kept tightly focused on the central couple’s romance, even when they are separated by geography, economics and politics. Much is made of the world-turned-upside-down absurdity of Labour prime minister Clement Attlee’s obsequious loyalty to South Africa while the Conservative Churchill appears to be an ally of Khama’s progressive cause (although pragmatism soon overrides opposition promises), but it’s the wholly believable and tangible bond between Oyelowo’s Seretse and Pike’s Ruth that delivers the real emotional punch.
As with 2014’s superb Belle, A United Kingdom depicts a world in flux, and once again Asante manages to dramatise global upheavals through intimate personal observations – Pike’s anxious yet resilient smile (not to mention her hilarious regal wave); Oyelowo’s defiant boxer stance and commanding vocal manner.
Having cut her teeth as an actor, the director draws terrific performances from her cast, who dance nimbly around some rather on-the-nose dialogue. Lively support comes from a superbly supercilious Jack Davenport as Sir Alistair Canning (a composite of snotty British representatives), and a sturdily sympathetic Terry Pheto as Seretse’s sister Naledi. Plaudits, too, to Nicholas Lyndhurst who wrings real pathos from his small but significant role as Ruth’s loving but outraged father.
“I want to make pieces of entertainment and art that mean something,” Asante recently told the BBC while musing upon her forthcoming film, Where Hands Touch, a longstanding passion project about a relationship between a bi-racial girl and a Hitler Youth boy in 1930s Berlin. “I want to make movies that leave some kind of mark on you.” With A United Kingdom she has done just that.
