Lion

It was our AGM last night and we decided to screen Lion. Usually we hold the AGM earlier, but it was just as well that we had to slip things this year to fit in with committee holiday plans as the Village Hall is also used as a polling station. It was also useful that the hall had black out curtains as the sun did not set until well after 9.00pm.

I'd seen Lion at the cinema earlier in the year and had enjoyed it very much. However I found it far more rewarding on a second viewing, noting especially the subtle way in which recollections of his Indian life slow come back into Saroo's mind as he starts searching for his past.

Here are my notes:

Lion

Australia 2016  118 minutes

Director:          Garth Davies

Starring:            Sunny Pawar, Dev Patel, Rooney Mara, David Wenham and Nicole Kidman

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for six Oscars, including Best Film, Best Supporting Actor (Dev Patel), Best Supporting Actress (Nicole Kidman) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Luke Davies)
• Won BAFTAs for Best Supporting Actor (Dev Patel) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Luke Davies) and three BAFTA nominations including Best Supporting Actress (Nicole Kidman)
• A further 30 wins and 67 nominations  

“There are films against which one’s head puts up a fight until, finally, the heart simply wants what it wants. Lion is one. This sweeping, sun-baked account of a life fatefully divided in childhood between two countries and families risks applying a glib National Geographic gloss to a unique existential crisis, until its sheer blunt force of feeling takes hold and the tear ducts are unlocked. Its opening stages, vividly conveying young Saroo Brierley’s accidental separation from his Indian family and subsequent Australian adoption, are unimprovable, its terror and compromised relief written in the extraordinary gaze of eight-year-old Sunny Pawar.”

Guy Lodge

After falling asleep on a train Saroo (Sunny Pawar), a five year old Indian boy, finds himself lost on the streets of Calcutta, and after being adopted by an Australian couple (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham) he moves to Australia to begin a new life with them. Twenty five years later the adult Saroo (Dev Patel) begins searching for his birth family in India.

The film is based on the book that Saroo Brierley wrote about his adoption and subsequent rediscovery of his birth family. The first half of the films follows the increasingly desperate life of the young Saroo after he finds himself lost in Calcutta while the second half covers the adult Saroo’s search for his family from Australia using Google Earth to locate landmarks that he could remember. This unusual structure to the screenplay departs from the traditional “three acts” of setup, confrontation and resolution, although given the nature of the story it is difficult to see how else it could have worked so well. The critical acclaim for the film reflected this with Luke Davies’s screenplay, amongst its other successes, winning a BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay and a nomination for an Oscar in the same category (it lost to Moonlight (2016)).

Salman Rushdie commented on the film’s Oscar nominations: "I would like it to win in every category it’s nominated for and in most of the categories it isn’t nominated for as well”. He admitted that he had wept “unstoppably” while watching it and added that he was "frequently suspicious of Western films set in contemporary India, and so one of the things that most impressed me about Lion was the authenticity and truth and unsparing realism of its Indian first half. Every moment of the little boy’s journey rings true – not an instant of exoticism – and as a result his plight touches us all. Greig Fraser’s cinematography portrays the beauty of the country, both honestly and exquisitely.”

Lion is Garth Davis’s first feature film as director. He started his career as an award-winning director of commercials and short films before moving into television where he directed several episodes of Jane Campion’s Emmy and BAFTA nominated series Top of the Lake (2013). Following the global success of Lion, it was announced that his next film will be a biopic based on the life of Mary Magdalene.

 

Here is the trailer:

 

An additional benefit of us having screened the film is that I'm currently enjoying the box set of Top of the Lake. I  missed it while it was on TV but read the reviews, and after seeing two episodes I can see why it was so well received.

 

 

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:

 

 

 

Stoker

We screened this last week.  Somehow I missed the film when it was on general release, and I when I started reading up on it to write my notes I thought it looked good.

I was not mistaken.

Here are my notes:

Stoker

USA 2012                    99 minutes

Director:                      Park Chan-wook

Starring:                        Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman and Matthew Goode

Awards and Nominations

• Seven wins
• 25 nominations

“The South Korean director Park Chan-wook makes an eye-catching English-language debut with his outrageous quasi-remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 thriller Shadow of a Doubt. Where Hitchcock's original injected a small drop of poison into picket-fence suburbia, Stoker stands proud as a full-blown gothic nightmare. ”

Xan Brooks

Following the death of India’s father, her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) who she never knew existed comes to live with her and Evelyn, her unstable mother (Nicole Kidman).  India (Mia Wasikowska) comes to suspect that this mysterious charming man has ulterior motives while at the same time becoming increasingly infatuated with him.

The script is by Wentworth Miller, best known as an actor in the TV series Prison Break (2005), although he submitted the script under a pseudonym, explaining later “I just wanted the scripts to sink or swim on their own”.  Miller described his story as “a horror film, a family drama and a psychological thriller”.   The title Stoker suggests a link to Bram Stoker, but in the context of the story Miller’s debt to Dracula lies more in the relationship between Charlie and India, echoing the corrupting influence that Dracula has on Lucy Westenra, rather than on any overt vampire references.  A more obvious source for Miller’s script is Hitchcock’s 1943 psychological thriller Shadow of a Doubt.   

In an interview Miller freely acknowledged this debt:  

"The jumping-off point is actually Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. So, that's where we begin, and then we take it in a very, very different direction”. 

 

He emphasises the point by giving India’s uncle the same name as that of Joseph Cotten’s psychopathic killer in the Hitchcock film.

This film is South Korean Park Chan-wook’s first English language feature, after making his name in South Korea as the writer and director of Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003) and Lady Vengeance (2005), the so-called Vengeance Trilogy.  Oldboy won the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival where Quentin Tarantino, a great fan, lobbied hard for it to be given the Palme d’Or.

Here's the trailer: