Blogpost by Dr. Andra Drăghiciu  Spoiler Alert: The Peaky Blinders Movie _ _ _ _ _

So, Tommy Shelby finally stopped creating wars outside himself and decided to turn to his actual problem – the war inside. I reckon this is a welcome development and a valuable message to everyone out there: If you want the world to be a better place, deal with your shit. 

But ultimately, there’s no rest for the wicked and the wars outside come looking for him in the manner the creators have accustomed us in the series: the modern, non-“gypsy” world arrives in an automobile at the front gate with Ada (Sophie Rundle), who is now MP for Small Heath, urging him to return, while a family of “gypsies” sneaks onto his land in caravans by cutting the fence. 

For somehow along the way, Tommy became “Rom Baro”: “The lady called you the Rom Baro, the king of all the Gypsies.” Of course, Johnny Dogs has to spell out the meaning of this in the first few minutes of the film, because the information is utterly new. During the series, there had been hints that the Shelby family descends from a royal line, but when and how Tommy became a king, and what that even means – we don’t know.  

Well, king or no king, fact is Tommy is scared of what goes on inside his head and therefore he is reluctant to leave his hermitage and show up for the people of Small Heath, for his subjects or for his son, Duke: “I’m not that man anymore”. But for one last hurrah, we need him out of the house, don’t we? Where living Ada fails, another – dead! – woman succeeds (and I know you hope I’m talking about Grace [Annabelle Wallis]… tearing up emoji) 

“Then I will help you be that man again.” – says Zelda's (Rebecca Ferguson) spirit, Duke’s dead mom, who has temporarily taken over her twin sister’s body (don’t worry, we’ll get to that in a second): “I need to wake you, Tommy. And not with words. With, um, a different kind of séance.” And just like that, after exchanging for gefühlt five minutes, the spirit of a dead woman starts kissing him and reminding him of the time they conceived Duke underneath the hazel tree – in the body of her own twin sister! (At this point, I just assumed there can be no movie without a sex scene, so they had to put it somewhere… no pun intended – straight face emoji).  

If this extremely implausible turn of events didn’t have you go about your business by now (in case you chose to watch this movie in one of the few selected theaters – please accept my condolences), brace yourself for the following exquisite piece of Steven Knight writing: 

Zelda (in Romanes): “You haven’t been with a woman in a long time.” (In English) “Was it good?”  

Tommy (in English): “Yeah, maybe.” 

Zelda (in English): “Huh? Maybe? Huh? Maybe?”  

… eyes rolling emoji… 

Of course, the next morning she’s gone. Like a mirage. Was she even there? 

In any case, after this um… different kind of séance, Tommy seems to be back to his old self. He swaps the monk attire for the Peaky Blinders uniform like a superhero going out of retirement to save the world one last time. 

In the meantime, Duke, who is a boring and lame character through and through, unlike the feisty boy we got to know in the series, is in cahoots with a British Nazi sympathizer named Beckett (Tim Roth). He is supposed to kill Ada, but chickens out, ‘cause you know… family. Ada gets killed anyway and Tommy feels it, has a vision of her spirit – the last one of his siblings withering away in the rain.  

Unfortunately, what follows is a borderline pathetic encounter between Tommy and Duke, which ends with them wresting in the mud of a pigsty. Covered in the metaphoric mud of his past and some very real pig faeces (imagine the smell!) Tommy goes to the hospital to find Ada’s corpse and confront Beckett. 

“All of us dead. Except for the one who wants to be dead.” Over his sister’s dead body, Tommy confesses that he killed Arthur: “It wasn’t an accident nor an act of mercy. I killed him, ‘cause I was full of booze and rage.”; “I killed me own brother, ‘cause I wanted to be free of him.”  

What!? Tommy Shelby, for whom family has been EVERYTHING throughout six seasons, 36 episodes and about as many hours of my life (twice!), who hardly ever lost control, killed his brother in a moment of drunken fury? Give me a break… 

Anyway, after this confession, Tommy takes a moment to shed some tears before putting his cap back on and getting into a shootout with Beckett, who manages to escape. Tommy subsequently rides into town on a black horse, bleeding all over, his suit covered in mud, to a stifled version of “Red Right Hand” with people leaning to touch him as if he were the Messiah – a far cry from his very first appearance in the series: young, proud and impeccably dressed on another black horse, people trembling and hiding at his sight. 

In order to defeat the bad guys, Tommy has to go underground one more time, and face the demons of his past. He saves the day, of course, and gets the medal he was looking for all along: peace. He is shot twice, yet remains standing, killing his adversary and waiting to be hit by the car (I know, that’s some James Bond shit right there).  

But Tommy Shelby can only be killed by Tommy Shelby – at least that’s what we learned in the last season of the series. Since the creators won't grant him the agency of taking his own life, he’s waiting to be killed by what (oh so erroneously) seems to be the next best thing: his son. “I am a horse.” Tommy says to Duke, clinging to him, defeated. He gives Duke the bullet with his name on it, urging his son to finish the job. “Heavy lies the crown.” Killing his father is Duke’s rite of passage; it’s what he has to do to be worthy of the crown. He immediately grows into his new role and starts ordering people around:  

Duke: “Collect it all and burn it. Eh?”  

Johnny Dogs “Yes… Rom Baro.” 

Shot by his son, Tommy’s life flashes before his eyes: “In the bleak… midwinter”. A very anticlimactic ending for the Thomas Shelby we had known and loved.  

Like John (Joe Cole), Polly (Helen McCrory), Arthur and Ada before him (no word about Finn [Harry Kirton] btw.), Tommy’s body is burned in a red wagon on the field with the fake Nazi money and the pictures of his loved ones.  

Although he was endowed with such an unworthy death, his legacy is beautiful:  

“Give my car to Johnny Dogs, my wine to the Garrison pub, my horses to someone who’s no work for them, my bullets to someone who’s no names to write on them, and my guns to someone who has no use for them. Once, I nearly had fucking everything. But nearly doesn’t count. But throughout it all, I had me family. We are reunited now in which ever place will have us. Burn my body. Let the ash blow. I am free.” 

His explosive life of crime and violence is bundled up into a precious lesson for the audience: Don’t try this at home, kids! 

2. Chiriklo Kaulo. Seriously, Rebecca, ist das dein Ernst?! 

Now that I vented about my disappointment at the de(con)struction of the main character, which is more a proof of my own fascination with the blue-eyed-well-dressed-neo-liberal-antihero (and of an itsy bit of internalized patriarchy) than anything else, let’s turn to the real issue of this movie: the stereotypical representation of a Romani community. 

As mentioned above, a few minutes in, Johnny Dogs announces that the Palmers (suggestive name, innit?), a family of “famous witches, fortune-tellers and palm readers” have cut the fence and camped on the grounds (‘cause why would they go through the front gate?). Staying true to his character in the series, suspicious and fearful of other “gypsies”, Johnny is reluctant to throw out the Palmers for fear of their curse. He talks about the Palmer queen asking for the “Rom Baro”, a fact which doesn’t seem to impress Tommy in the slightest: “I want no one near this house. Not even interesting people.”  

Shortly after this exchange, Tommy returns from his daily conversations over Arthur’s tomb to a cracked door, open windows and a note: “Follow the open windows.” He hears a female voice reading his manuscript: “I hurt my brothers, mostly Arthur, the beast on chain.”  

With long dark hair and dressed completely in black, a rugged rock’n’roll version of the old “gypsy queen” trope greets him: “Hey. I just opened the windows to let some of the spirits out. I’m here to give a message for the Rom Baro.” Seeing her face, he remembers Duke’s mom, Zelda. As it turns out, this is her twin sister:  Kaulo Chiriklo, meaning blackbird in Romanes. And here comes the good part: Even though she died a while ago, Zelda still speaks to her sister. Or the other way around:  

Kaulo: “I still speak to her. In dreams. In séance. She wanted me to give you a message”.  

Hinting at the Nazi persecution of Romani and Sinti people, the message is that Duke is working with evil men, “Men who would destroy our people. Gypsy people.”; and he needs Tommy’s help to get back on track. What she offers in return is something Tommy has been looking for since we met him 13 years ago: “If you agree to come back and help your son, my sister and I will help you find peace.” 

But the racial persecution of Romani people doesn’t become a real topic, on the contrary. It is mentioned once again briefly towards the end of the film when Stagg (Stephen Graham) is puzzled by Tommy’s lack of involvement in this war: “But they’re Nazis and you’re a Gypsy. They’ve been slaughtering your people for years. So this always was your war.” 

Instead, the creators have again employed, nay – used – the characters’ Romani background  to create a “gypsy mask” (Mladenova) which is supposed to convey exotic mystery and detail to the story.  

Just like in the series, Tommy is an empowered protagonist, which is unusual for the history of cinema, set against a backdrop of antigypsyist stereotypes. Which is a lot more than I can say about the other “gypsy” figures. Except for Kaulo, the Palmers are faceless characters with a proclivity for delinquency as, in Kaulo's own words, “There’s not a lock, a fence, or a gate my cousins can’t remove.”; and charlatanism:  

“That woman is the queen of the Palmer Gypsies. She runs séances for women who have lost their sons and husbands in the war. She’s making money from their grieving, Tom. Don’t let her use your grief, Tom!” (Johnny Dogs). 

And what about Kaulo?  

She knows everything about Tommy, details only the dead could have told her, which convinces Tommy that she is, indeed, for real. Like a she-devil whispering in the son’s ear, Kaulo speaks to Duke in Romanes, giving him the bullet with Tommy’s name on it, so he can kill his father and become Rom Baro: “Together we can rule.” (antigypsyist and sexist much?)  

Oh, and what’s with the accent, which sounds like it’s borrowed from Coppola’s 1992 rendition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula?! 

Rebecca Ferguson, the (blond) actress, answers this question in “Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man Podcast”, episode four. Asked by the host what it means to play a Romani character, Ferguson replies: “I’ve done so much research. The way they looked, their tattoos (…) I did a deep dive.” [emphasis added].  

And by way of this extensive research, she came to the pertinent conclusion that:  

“The gypsies… The fact that they are travelers gives you the freedom… That’s sort of how I read into it.” [emphasis added] 

She mentions that there are Travelers (or g…? careful there, Rebecca!) in Sweden, Romania, England…  

“They’re all over”. [emphasis added] 

And this – of course – led her to do a – guess what – “Romani accent” rather than a Birmingham one. !! Outraged emoji !! 

“(…) the Romani accent felt easier for me as a Swede to go into.” 

What is a Romani accent, Rebecca?!!  

And she doesn’t stop there… Oh no… She goes on to talk about her character’s tattoos, mentioning symbols for “magic”, “family”, “clan”, “gold”, “heritage”, “tree”, “apple”… 

Honestly, Rebecca, it’s striking how you can invoke diversity and then go on to homogenize and essentialize such heterogenous communities in the same breath… face palm emoji. 

3. Silence is Golden 

To conclude, and this one goes especially to my blond friend up there: silence is golden. But they just couldn’t shut up, could they? Not only did they make this disappointing film, which gives me the feeling that they just wanted to burry Tommy Shelby so Cilian Murphy can move on to playing the new villain in the next James Bond movie (fingers crossed emoji), they also made a six-episode podcast about it! The interviews with some of the cast and crew members as well as with historians (!) are an obvious attempt to add an authenticity badge to a film that “(…) really leaned into the whole sort of Gypsy, Romani world or like superstition or magic or … witchcraft, whatever you want to call it.” (Cilian Murphy in the podcast ep. 4).  

Just like the series, “The Immortal Man” (it occurred to me that I hadn’t even mentioned the film's actual title) reproduces a whole lot of antigypsyist stereotypes, using the “gypsy” mask as a symbol for tradition, delinquency, the occult and dark part of the human psyche. Romanes, a language spoken by actual people in different dialects (and accents!) across Europe and beyond, is employed as an artefact that on the one hand underlines otherness and on the other hand vies for authenticity.   

If you ask me, the only good things about this movie are Cilian Murphy’s acting, the soundtrack, and Johnny Dogs’ line:  

“If you are the father and Duke is the son, then the holy ghost Johnny Dogs is going to need a fucking revolver.” 

Amen! 

 

PS: For a more in-depth analysis of the Peaky Blinders series, check out my paper “Not Another “Gypsy-Themed” Movie? Traces of Antigypsyism in the Period Drama Peaky Blinders”. To the paper