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:

 

 

 

One Day

Another month and another film... Here are my notes for this week's screening:

One Day

UK 2011                      108 minutes

Director:                      Lone Scherfig

Starring:                        Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, Jodie Whittaker, Ken Stott, Patricia Clarkson, Rafe Spall, Romola Garai

 “In a season of movies dumb and dumber, One Day has style, freshness, and witty bantering dialogue. Anne Hathaway is so attractive that she would be advised to sometimes play against type (the eyeglasses she wears at the beginning are a bit over the top).  Jim Sturgess contributes the film's most versatile performance, one that depends on exact timing and control of the balance between pathos and buffoonery.  It's a decent night at the movies, if however a letdown after An Education, the previous film by Lone Scherfig.”

Roger Ebert

Upper class Dexter (Jim Sturgess) and working class Emma (Anne Hathaway) graduate from the University of Edinburgh on 15^th July 1988; they spend the night together but decide to remain just as friends.  The story then follows their respective lives on the same date over the next twenty years. 

The film is based on the award-winning novel of the same name by David Nicholls.  He worked as an actor for a number of years before writing several number novels as well as a number of TV and film scripts.  His screenplays include adaptations of two his novels: Starter for 10 (2006) and One Day (2011). 

 In the book the unusual structure of following the protagonists on just one day over a twenty year period works well, although in the film it is possible to see this just as a gimmick.  However as author of both the original novel and the screenplay there must be a reason for its retention and in The Guardian film blog David Cox proposes an interesting theory:

“Emma and Dex throw away what should have been the prime of their lives. He wraps himself up in coke and self-love; she hides herself in her own cocoon of denial. The book's annual audit anatomised their folly in meticulous detail. Their wasted years were mercilessly ticked off and the course of their delusion was unerringly charted until they were subjected to deserved punishment.

This is the chronicle of wasted youth, rich in emotional nuance and period detail, that the book's snapshots encapsulated so tellingly. In the film's necessary haste, they reveal only blurry banality. Perhaps this key element of the book could have been conveyed through some means other than annual snapshots in a way that would have been more compatible with a two-hour film. Perhaps not.”

There was also criticism of Anne Hathaway’s Yorkshire accent, with one critic describing it as all over the shop (“Sometimes she's from Scotland, sometimes she's from New York, you just can't tell.”).  Anne Hathaway subsequently claimed that she watched Emmerdale to help her as she found the accent “a challenge”.

 Lone Scherfig started her career in Denmark, but she gained worldwide fame when she directed the internationally successful An Education in the UK.

Here's the trailer: