Category Archives: Arts

Arts, Films

Film Review: Breathe

REVIEW

Claire Foy and Andrew Garfield as Diana and Robin Cavendish in Breathe.

BREATHE is a cinema picture for which one packet of tissues might not be sufficient. Even for those hardened movie critics one could expect some audible blubbing by the end. You would surely need a heart of stone not to be moved by this beautiful film.

Breathe tells the true story of an upper-crust English couple, Robin and Diana Cavendish – brilliantly played by Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy – who meet in 1958 with the world seemingly at their feet.

They are dazzlingly attractive, privileged, sociable, and popular. Scarcely have they married and set up home in Kenya, where Robin works as a tea-broker, at least until it’s time for G&Ts on the veranda, and Diana falls pregnant. They are on the threshold of a gilded life together.

But then, out of the blue, catastrophe strikes. Robin contracts polio and Diana is told not only that he will be paralysed from the neck down for the rest of his days, but that those days are strictly numbered. He has a few months at best.

Anyone who has watched the Netflix series The Crown will recall Foy playing another young, upper-class, married woman who was also in Kenya (and, also, in the 1950s), when she received devastating, life-changing news. In that instance, it was the King, her father, who had died.

But like the young Princess Elizabeth, Diana Cavendish seems to be hewn from one enormous stiff upper lip.

She does not fall apart, because she cannot. She will take Robin and their baby boy back to England and start anew, treating the worst that life can throw at her with as much grace as she treated the best.

The producer of Breathe is Jonathan Cavendish, who was that baby boy.

 

THIS film is his parents’ story and he deserves to be inordinately proud of it, because it is not mawkish or even overly sentimental, as in lesser directorial hands it might have been.

The director is Andy Serkis – better known for his work in front of the camera as the so-called king of motion-capture, the technology that allowed him, so exquisitely, to inhabit Caesar in the Planet Of The Apes films, and Gollum in the Lord Of The Rings series.

Here, with the help of an excellent screenplay by William Nicholson (who explored similar territory in his play Shadowlands), he has mastered what you might call emotion-capture.

Breathe is a searingly moving, impeccably sensitive and, at times, very comical depiction of a uniquely British response to dreadful adversity.

At first, however, Robin simply wants to die. Trapped in an English hospital bed, hooked up to a respirator that by today’s standards looks impossibly antiquated, he can’t bear what he has become. He won’t even look at his infant son.

But then he and Diana confound medical convention, not to mention the rather pompous consultant (Jonathan Hyde), by resolving that he will live out his days at home.

There, with Diana as his carer, his joie de vivre comes flooding back. It becomes clear that the terrible prognosis was wrong, or at least, has been overcome. Although home-care is fraught with challenges, at a time when it was unheard of for polio victims, Robin now has a future.

Nonetheless, he will never breathe unaided which, medical wisdom dictates, means that he is destined always to be bedridden.

Then Robin has an extraordinary idea. What if a wheelchair could be converted into a respirator?

He shares this brainwave with an inventor friend, Professor Teddy Hall (Hugh Bonneville), and suddenly he is sufficiently mobile, with the devoted support of Diana and her twin brothers (both played very chirpily by Tom Hollander), they even contemplate a foreign holiday. This, it should be pointed out, was in the days when ‘disabled access’ meant removing a door frame.

At a conference in Germany, Robin issues a plea with which today we are entirely familiar, but which then sounded downright radical: that as a severely disabled person ‘I don’t want to just survive, I want to truly live’.

Paralysed he might be, yet, like U.S. civil rights leaders in the same period of history, he makes valiant, pioneering strides towards a new understanding, a new enlightenment.

And his chair goes into mass production.

I suppose Breathe protects us from some of the agonies and indignities of extensive paralysis. And there will doubtless be some ungenerous beings who point out that even in his stricken state, Robin Cavendish still existed in a bubble of poshness and privilege.

 

HAD HIS background been more modest, his chums less well-connected, he would have had a shorter and more wretched life. This is a world of hat-pins, striped blazers and jolly fancy-dress shindigs, and Serkis revels in it.

But then it’s the truth of this remarkable story that makes it so intensely affecting, combined with the perfection of both lead performances.

Garfield and Foy have both done plenty of fine work in the past, but none of it better than this. The steady love but evolving relationship between Robin and Diana seems utterly real.

I hope those responsible for handing out acting awards don’t mind being reminded how much they seem to adore portrayals of extreme disability by able-bodied actors.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Eddie Redmayne, for example, already have Oscars to show for it. Andrew Garfield was nominated for one Academy Award for Best Actor in 2017 but didn’t win the award. Surely, his time will come.

 

Breathe (12A)

Verdict: Searingly moving

★★★★★

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Arts, History, Philosophy

(Philosophy) Essential Thinkers: Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 – 1900

The work of Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history.

One of the most profound, enigmatic and ultimately controversial philosophers in the whole of the Western canon, Nietzsche’s work has been variously appropriated, vilified, venerated or simply misunderstood. Through the relationship of his sister, Elisabeth, with the national socialists in Germany, Nietzsche’s philosophy has wrongly gained the reputation of supporting Nazism, though his concept of the  Übermensch or ‘superman’, is in fact closer to Aristotle’s man of virtue than the glorified Aryan hero. Elisabeth’s edited and altered collection of Nietzsche’s writings, published shortly after his death as The Will to Power, has done much to mar the reception of Nietzsche’s thought in the twentieth century. As a result, it may be another hundred years before his philosophy is widely appreciated for the genius that it is. Freud said of Nietzsche that ‘he had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live’.

Son of a Protestant clergyman, Nietzsche gained a professorship at the University of Basel at the remarkable age of only twenty-four. After ten years, ill health forced him to retire into a solitudinous but vagrant lifestyle across Europe, whence he devoted himself to writing and recuperation. He eventually received worldwide fame during the last decade or so of his life. Of this he was probably unaware, since, in 1889, Nietzsche suffered a final and irreversible breakdown and remained insane until his death.

Nietzsche’s writings are varied and cover diverse topics, from ethics and religion to metaphysics and epistemology (study of the source, nature, and limitations of knowledge). He is most renowned, however, for his concept of ‘the will to power’. Influenced by Schopenhauer to a certain extent, albeit without so much metaphysical baggage, Nietzsche saw the fundamental driving force of the individual as expressed in the need to dominate and control the external forces operating upon him. As such, Nietzsche’s individual requires what the existentialists would later give him, the power to be master of his own destiny.

The frustration of this urge is responsible for the existence of various moral systems and religious institutions, all of which attempt to bind and subdue the will. Perhaps because of his father’s influence, Nietzsche was particularly hostile to Christianity, which he famously once described as being a ‘slave morality’. In it he saw the resentment of the weak towards the strong. Those who failed to have the courage to master their own passions, who lacked, ultimately, inner strength of character, sought revenge on those stronger than themselves, not in this life, but in a fictional ‘other’ world, where some other power, namely God, would wreak vengeance on their behalf.

Unlike Schopenhauer, Nietzsche did not see the will to power as something to be resisted, but pursued and affirmed. It is, Nietzsche insists, the exuberance of spring, the affirmation of life, the saying of ‘Yes!’ However, as already outlined, Nietzsche did not advocate the dominance of the strong over the weak, nor suggest that mastery of the will to power belonged to some special elite by virtue of birth. Rather he described, historically, how the domination of the strong results in, and is necessary to, what we would now call, the ‘evolutionary progress’ of the human being. But strength, as Nietzsche understands it, is not constituted in physical, but rather psychical, force. The strong are those who are more complete, as human beings, who have learnt to sublimate and control their passions, to channel the will to power into a creative force.

Neither, contrary to popular misunderstanding, did Nietzsche endorse the ‘master morality’ – moral systems peculiar to the aristocracy – although it is true he thought it more life affirming than ‘slave morality’, which he insists is typified within Christianity. Rather, Nietzsche held that the strong had a duty towards the less fortunate: ‘The man of virtue, too, helps the unfortunate, but not, or almost not, out of pity, but prompted by an urge which is begotten by the excess of power’.

. Previously (Philosophy) Essential Thinkers: Plato

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Arts, Books, Britain, History, Military, Photography

Book Review: Birth of the RAF (& Gallery)

(LONG-READ COMPOSITION)

THE order to ‘Scramble’ had finally come and the ever-eager Squadron Leader Douglas Bader led his team of Spitfires and Hurricanes in a fast ascent into the sky over southern England.

It was September 1940, the height of the Battle of Britain. In the distance, a cluster of black dots scattered across the sky.

Over the radio came the cry: ‘Bandits, 10 o’clock!’ There were 70 of them, Dornier bombers and their fighter plane escorts. Bader closed fast, ignoring the streams of tracer streaking at him from their rear gunners.

. See also Britain: ‘RAF and the ‘Battle of the Beams’…

A Messerschmitt floated into his sights. He gave a quick burst of fire and felt a moment of triumph and relief as he saw it fall, smoke pouring from its tail.

Relief turned to fear as there then followed a horrible, jarring shock as German cannon shells slammed into his own plane. Instinctively, he banked hard left as his cockpit filled with smoke. He was going down in flames.

Gripped by the inevitable, he pulled back the hood to bale out – until the slipstream cleared the smoke and he realised the fire had miraculously gone out. He was all right after all.

Using all his strength and skill, he eased the Hurricane out of its screaming dive and gave chase to another Messerschmitt, firing three sharp bursts.

It veered groundward and seconds later exploded. But Bader was in real trouble now too, his aircraft crabbing awkwardly, left wing dropping, holes in the cockpit and the side of the airframe.

His flying-suit was gashed across the right hip. Somehow, he nursed the Hurricane back to base, landed, taxied to the maintenance hangar and climbed out, barking: ‘I want this aircraft ready again in half an hour!’

Here was the raw, do-or-die courage, the refusal to be beaten, that came to typify Britain’s Royal Air Force. The service is now set to celebrate 100 years since it was founded on April 1, 1918.

The formation of the RAF had a difficult birth. Conceived in panic against the wishes of the other armed forces, the RAF was sniped at from all sides and only just managed to survive as an independent organisation. It was a good job it did.

It nurtured the likes of the indomitable Bader (who’d lost both his legs in a pre-war crash when showing off his aerobatic skills), without whom the Battle of Britain, its finest hour, would not have been won. It has proved its worth ever since.

Spitfires Oil Painting

Oil Painting: ‘Spitfires’

 

IN a new book by historian Richard Overy, it comes as a surprise to learn that getting the RAF off the ground took herculean effort – and very nearly didn’t happen.

Britain had war planes in service ever since the start of World War I, with their importance in battle growing even though flying then was still rudimentary and dangerous.

Flimsy planes made of wood and fabric and held together with wire were liable to break up or crash.

Pilots took to the air in combat after just a dozen hours training, wrapped up in layers of clothing and multiple balaclavas to keep out the cold in the open cockpits. There were no parachutes.

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