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:
Here's a link to the trailer:
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
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.
