Dunkirk

We started the New Year with Dunkirk: not really a seasonal film, but it is new to DVD and we attracted a reasonable audience.

I'd seen the film at the cinema and had been impressed and was looking forward to seeing it again. The structure is complex but it looks very simple: as ever the art is in concealing the art.

One of my main recollections from the first film was Mark Rylance's superb performance, and I was equally impressed on this second viewing. I assume that his character would have been old enough to have taken part in WW1: he does not mention this but you can sense it from his heroic weariness as he decides to take his boat to Dunkirk rather than merely handing it over to the Navy.

Here are my notes:

Dunkirk

UK 2017          106 minutes

Director:          Christopher Nolan

Starring:            Fionn Whitehead, Barry Keoghan, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy and Kenneth Branagh

Awards and Nominations to date

• Number 13 in The Guardian’s list of the Best Films of 2017
• Nominated for Golden Globe for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Score
• Nominated by the London Critics Circle Film Awards for Best Film, Best British/Irish Film, Best Director and three other categories
• A further 18 wins and 86 nominations

“This is a powerful, superbly crafted film with a story to tell, avoiding war porn in favour of something desolate and apocalyptic, a beachscape of shame, littered with soldiers zombified by defeat, a grimly male world with hardly any women on screen. It is Nolan’s best film so far. It also has Hans Zimmer’s best musical score: an eerie, keening, groaning accompaniment to a nightmare, switching finally to quasi-Elgar variations for the deliverance itself.”

Peter Bradshaw

 During the fall of France in the Spring of 1940 Allied soldiers have retreated to the coast at Dunkirk. As the troops wait for evacuation the Royal Navy requisitions small civilian vessels that can sail in the shallow waters close to the beaches, while in the air Spitfires try to save British ships from attack by Nazi planes.

Nolan directed the film from his own script which tells the story of the evacuation from the perspectives of land, sea and air. Each story develops over different timescales so that although they are edited together it is only towards the climax of the film that the different narratives coincide. He had initially conceived the idea for the film in the mid-1990s but had postponed the project until he had enough experience of directing large scale action films. His aim was to tell the story solely from the perspective of the soldiers on the beaches: thus the invading Nazi forces do not appear. Additionally Nolan avoided any scenes with Churchill who had become Prime Minister only on10^th May 1940 in order to prevent the complexity of the domestic political situation undermining the story of the evacuation. The circumstances of Churchill’s assumption of power and subsequent wartime premiership are a major story themselves and are the subject of Joe Wright’s forthcoming film Darkest Hour (2017) with Gary Oldman starring as Churchill.

The major events in the film are based on the historical record and Nolan worked closely with a historical consultant to ensure the accuracy of the film; similarly although the characters are all fictional some of them are based in part on Dunkirk veterans whose stories Nolan encountered during his research. The evacuation at Dunkirk itself was a major turning point in the Second World War and appeared on screen as early as 1942 as part of the plot of Mrs Miniver. In 1958 Leslie Norman, father of Barry, directed Dunkirk which starred John Mills, Richard Attenborough and Bernard Lee; the film became the second most popular production of the year in the UK. The evacuation also featured in a key sequence in Joe Wright’s Atonement (2007) and more recently Their Finest (2016) depicted the making of a wartime propaganda film about Dunkirk to raise morale in a war-ravaged Britain. 

On its release in 2017 Dunkirk received praise for its screenplay, direction, soundtrack and photography, with some critics acclaiming it as one of the greatest war films ever made. Somewhat inevitably Nigel Farage attempted to use the film to promote his own blinkered perspective of history by circulating a photograph of himself in front of a poster for the film with the patronising exhortation: “I urge every youngster to go out and watch #Dunkirk”. Clearly he had forgotten that Britain did not stand alone against Nazi Germany and that Churchill himself, a lifelong patriot, amateur historian and arguably the greatest British Prime Minister of the twentieth century, had actually favoured an “indissoluble” union with a France. In an era of fake news it is vital to remember the following words of wisdom: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts”.

Here is a link to the trailer:

Before I Go To Sleep

I'd not read the book that this film was based on, and it would have been interesting to see how the novelist managed to conceal some of the more incongruous elements of the story.  As it was, the film was very entertaining g, with a real shock coming from the two male leads who were very definitely cast against type.

Here are my notes:

Before I Go to Sleep

USA 2014                    92 minutes

Director:                      Rowan Joffe

Starring:                        Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth, Mark Strong and Anne-Marie Duff

“...an enjoyable shaggy dog story with a twist that will leave you with the strange feeling that you've seen all this before, even if you can't quite remember where.”

 

Mark Kermode

Christine (Nicole Kidman) is a middle-aged woman who wakes each day with no memory of her life from her mid-20s onward, so every morning Ben (Colin Firth) has to tell her that he is her husband, she was in an accident, and as a result of this she is suffering from amnesia.  But one day while Ben is at work a call from Dr Nasch (Mark Strong) informs Christine about a camera on which she has been keeping a secret video diary.

The film is based on the recent bestselling novel by S J Watson, but the subject of amnesia has long been popular with film makers:  Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) is a classic Hollywood film while more recently in Memento (2000) Christopher Nolan tells the story of his amnesiac hero by interspersing black-and-white sequences that tell a chronological story with colour sequences in reverse chronological order (the DVD allows viewers to restructure the film so that they can see it with a conventional chronology). 

In his perceptive review of Before I Go to Sleep Mark Kermode also notes key similarities with the plot of Wolfgang Petersen’s Shattered, another film about an amnesiac:

“I don't know whether Joffe is familiar with Petersen's 1991 oddity but his film certainly seems to remember it well.”

Rowan Joffe is the son of director , best known for The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission (1986), and the actress Jane Lapotaire.  After winning awards for his screen writing he directed his first film The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall for TV which won a BAFTA in 2009.  He followed this with his own adaptation of Brighton Rock (2011).  His other screenplay credits include 28 Weeks Later (2007) and the George Clooney vehicle The American (2010).

 Here's the trailer: