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:

Their Finest

The less "official" work I have to do, the more my day seems to fill up with other urgent matters: hence there is less time for me to keep this blog up to date.

Thus although we have finished our screenings for the Christmas period I am behind with posting my notes, so here we go with the first catch-up session.

Their Finest was my recommendation after having seen it at the cinema. It was good to see that it went down well, I enjoyed it even more at a second viewing and I was delighted to see that Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian has nominated the screenplay as one of the best of the year.

Here are my notes:

Their Finest

UK 2016          117 minutes

Director:          Lone Scherfig

Starring:            Gemma Arterton, Sam Clafin, Bill Nighy, Jack Huston and Paul Ritter

Awards and Nominations

• Nominations for Best Debut Screenplay (Gaby Chiappe) and Best Effects at the British Independent Film Awards
• One other win and one other nomination

“You’d need a heart of stone and a funny bone of porridge not to enjoy this sweet-natured and eminently lovable British film – a 1940s adventure, with moments of brashness and poignancy. It’s all about the love that flowers in the ruins of blitz-hit London and in the dusty offices of the Ministry of Information’s film unit as various high-minded creative types use the magic of cinema to keep the nation’s pecker up.”

Peter Bradshaw

 

During the London Blitz Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) is recruited by the Ministry of Information to write scripts for propaganda films that the public will like, and investigates a story of two young girls who supposedly piloted a boat to help with the evacuation at Dunkirk. The story turns out to be not entirely true but it provides the basis of a feature film that the MoI team decide to make. They cast veteran actor Ambrose Hilliard (Bill Nighy) in a supporting role and as the film goes into production they constantly have to revise the script to meet government requirements, including the unexpected addition of an American character to the beaches of Dunkirk so that the film will help the appeal to the US to join the war on the Allied side.

The film is one of several recent releases – Dad’s Army (2016), Darkest Hour (2017), Dunkirk (2017) and Churchill (2017) – that cover an earlier period in British history which involved certain difficulties relating to events in mainland Europe. Perhaps this focus on Europe reflects current political pre-occupations, although the government’s approach to the Brexit negotiations seems to be far closer to the Home Guard of Walmington-on-Sea rather than to Churchill, as depicted in Darkest Hour, who as a newly appointed Prime Minister in the summer of 1940 used his eloquence to persuade the Cabinet to continue to fighting Hitler and the Nazis rather than seek some form of negotiated settlement; this was the decisive event which saved the country and which Simon Schama has rightly described as “the first great battle of the Second World War”.

In his enthusiastic review of the film Peter Bradshaw focuses on the filmmaking part of the story rather than its historical context and compares the film with Truffaut’s La Nuit Americaine (1973):

“It’s a film unashamedly and cheerfully in love with the conjuring tricks and artifice of cinema. There’s a showstopping matte shot of massed troops on the Dunkirk beach, painted on to glass, and a demonstration of how dubbing and editing can create an illusion of physical presence. Truffaut talked about la nuit americaine – here’s a film about la nuit britannique, a very British kind of film magic. In an earlier scene, Amanda Root plays an actress wearing a hat that recalls Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter, and later there’s a scene next to a mocked-up third-class railway carriage.”

Lone Scherfig began her career in Denmark before making her name internationally with the Oscar-nominated An Education (2009). Her subsequent work has included One Day (2011), an adaptation of the novel by David Nicholls, and The Riot Club (2014), a filmed version of Laura Wade’s play Posh.

 Here's a link to the trailer: