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Arts, Films

Film Review: The Guardians

TRAGEDY ON THE FRENCH HOME FRONT

Sowing tension: ‘Land girls’ Francine (Iris Bry) and Hortense (Nathalie Baye) work the fields of the Massif Central.

THE story of France’s land girls during the First World War is told with patience and painterly finesse in this softly virtuosic period drama from Xavier Beauvois (Of Gods and Men), based on a 1924 novel by Ernest Perochon. The place is the pastoral folds and plains of the Limousin in the Massif Central, the year 1915, the mood tense but perseverant.

The region’s menfolk are gone, swallowed up by the front some 400 miles to the north-east. So it falls to the women to till the soil and gather the crops – women like 20-year-old orphan Francine (screen newcomer Iris Bry), who arrives at the door of stoic, pewter-haired farmer’s widow Hortense (Nathalie Baye) on a 12-month contract, ready to do her bit.

The war itself is rarely glimpsed, but always invisibly present, through both the landscape’s eerie half-emptiness and the water-torture drip of death notices announced in church, as Beauvois’s camera watches the faces of the mourners.

When Hortense’s son Georges (Cyril Descours) comes home on leave, a seam of sexual tension is struck through the daily routine: Georges is at least informally betrothed to young Marguerite (Mathilde Viseux), but he and Francine strike up a close relationship, and the two correspond by letter when he returns to active duties.

Hortense’s daughter Solange (played by Baye’s real daughter, Laura Smet) is already married, but her husband Clovis (Olivier Rabourdin) has been embittered by the conflict – a far cry from the handsome American GIs now roving around the landscape.

Beauvois’s vision of the period is totally convincing, and his depiction of hardscrabble farm life rings with a quiet vibrancy – a slow-burn story of tragedy and betrayal takes shape, but some of the best moments here are when the film just watches Hortense, Francine and Solange go about their work, and scenes in which charcoal is made in a mossy forest kiln and pats of golden butter are slapped into shape in the pantry look like magical rites.

Period detail feels truthful thanks to its particular way of looking: cinematographer Caroline Champetier’s compositions look like canvassers by Daubigny, Corot and Millet, capturing the essence of a moment so vividly you can almost smell the morning mist.

This is a rich, fulfilling film that rolls along with the bittersweet turn of the seasons, and makes century-old rhythms of living engrossing and fresh.

 

The Guardians (15 cert)

Verdict: Endearingly rich and moving

★★★★

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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, Britain, Films, History, Second World War

Film Review: Dunkirk

LITERARY REVIEW

THERE haven’t been many good films about the mass evacuation of Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in the early summer of 1940. Strangely, however, two of the most notable were made in the same year, with World War II still raging. William Wyler’s Oscars-festooned Mrs Miniver, and David Lean’s In Which We Serve, both came out in 1942.

In 1958, the film Dunkirk directed by Barry Norman’s father Leslie, made a pretty decent fist of showing why Churchill called the events of May 26 to June 4, 1940, “a colossal military disaster”.

That is perhaps why not too many movies have been made about it. By contrast, D-Day and its aftermath, received oodles of cinematic attention. That event was just four months after the events at Dunkirk. But that was based on an advance; Dunkirk was merely about the definitive retreat.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan receives plaudits from many for tackling it again now, so unambiguously many of the protagonists say. Despite some of the gaps that historians will exploit, such as the absence from the film of some 15,000 Scottish soldiers of the Highland Regiments nearby, or even that of the assistance provided by India and its soldiers, this gripping and unconventional film is a mighty accomplishment all the same. It will be interesting to see whether the film will collect as many Academy Awards as Wyler’s Mrs Miniver (six).

Contrary to some over-excited reports, its main achievement is not to offer proof that the One Direction boyband star Harry Styles, who makes his screen debut can really act. Rather, it is to show, in much more vivid detail than Norman’s 1958 film, why a French place-name that is synonymous with British stoicism more accurately reflects Churchill’s infamous and grave assessment. Read enough reports, for example, of townsfolk battling against rising floodwaters, and it won’t be too long before you come across the evocative phrase “Dunkirk spirit”.

The new Prime Minister’s famous bulldog exhortation to fight on the beaches, in the fields and in the streets, was delivered in response to Dunkirk. But the same speech included the declaration that “wars are not won by evacuations”.

EMOTIVE

NOLAN uses that line as his mantra. From the film’s first frame to its last, there is never any doubt that we are witnessing a catastrophe. After all, some 338,000 members of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) returned home, but around 68,000 were lost.

The film begins, quite dramatically, with a young soldier, Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), running from German gunfire through the streets of the small French seaside town.

His arrival on the beach yields a breathtaking sight, for him and us alike. Tens of thousands of men are lined up, almost as far as the eye can see, waiting to climb into boats that have yet to arrive. And there are German bombers overhead.

Tommy hooks up with a French soldier and together they carry a wounded man on a stretcher towards the sea, not so much to save his skin as theirs. Indeed, one of the reasons this film is so moving is not so much its frequent displays of doughty heroism (not least from Mark Rylance as Mr Dawson, one of the many civilian skippers who took their boats to help with the evacuation), but more its powerful depiction of an intense will to live, against seemingly insuperable odds.

Survival instincts can sometimes look like the very opposite of bravery. Cillian Murphy plays a shellshocked soldier, saved from the sea by Mr Dawson, who cannot bear to return to Dunkirk. However, we are encouraged not to judge him, even when he does something with terrible consequences.

The film has emotive scenes. One is where an elderly blind man, back in Blighty, welcomes home the bedraggled returning soldiers by telling them “well done”. But all they did, one of them responds, was survive. “That’s enough,” says the old man.

Another is when Kenneth Branagh’s naval commander first spots salvation in the form of all those fishing-boats and pleasure crafts helping in the rescue effort. Yet, the film does not feel manipulative. Nolan could have made more of his opening shot of the rescuing flotilla. It could have been breathtaking; thousands of boats bobbing all the way to the horizon. But he keeps it real, with a suitably motley, but relatively small, advance fleet.

With astute screenwriting, Nolan offers us a series of small, personal dramas rather than any overall narrative thread, which we must suppose is precisely what war is.

There are no scenes with Churchill and his top brass back in Whitehall trying to orchestrate Operation Dynamo, the somewhat grandiose seat-of-the-pants exercise. Instead, Nolan is far more intent on evoking the frantic chaos of that momentous week.

There is a strong sense, too, which even the best war films sometimes fail to convey, of nobody quite knowing what’s going to happen next. The director communicates this by keeping dialogue to a minimum, daringly considering his heavyweight cast. Hoyte van Hoytema’s rousing cinematography tells the story just as eloquently and powerful as any words. At times, though, there is an almost documentary realism to proceedings, which won’t please everyone. Not all viewers will be spellbound.

The film is presented from three perspectives – from land, sea and air – each within a different time frame. The fate of Tommy and a few other desperate soldiers unfolds over a week. Another is played, splendidly, by Styles, who reportedly auditioned without Nolan having the slightest idea who he was, but whose presence should tempt youngsters to watch this film. Let’s hope so. They’ll perhaps realise that ‘one direction’ has a much more solemn meaning when applied to Dunkirk.

Dunkirk (12A)

Verdict: Unmissable epic ★★★★★

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