Horace Ové’s fascinating, pioneering drama from 1975 is restored and re-released as part of a retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank. The first full-length black British film, Pressure is vigorous and rough-hewn and Ové lays down the broad brushstrokes with compulsive energy. It has the punchy quality of a 21st-century graphic novel, eagerly tackling Black Power and social realism, mixing comedy, tragedy and irony. There’s a surreal fantasy sequence, a moment of real horror in a hospital and a full-on Sweeney-style police foot-chase through the streets.
The film’s reappearance may be a madeleine for the 70s, but it’s also a reminder that the pressure Britain’s black communities have withstood hasn’t subsided. We are now watching this film the other side of the New Cross fire, Stephen Lawrence, and the Teresa May “hostile environment” policy which was chillingly deporting those very same Windrush veterans on whose experiences and legacy Britain’s media establishment had been sentimentally congratulating itself for the 70th anniversary in 2018. To watch the movie on the big screen is an eerie experience: the grimness of west London’s pre-gentrified Ladbroke Grove is revealed in dreamlike, deep-focus, pinsharp detail. Ové brilliantly uses real people and real streetscapes behind his characters as they stroll up and down; there’s a great moment when a baffled, irritated woman comes right up behind the action, mid-dialogue, grumpily trying to get past.
