Tag Archives: Film review

Arts, Films

Film Review: Puzzle (15)

REVIEW

Modest champion: Actress Kelly Macdonald in Puzzle

A FILM can sometimes be so quiet and uneventful, yet at the same time so full of tenderness and charm, that at the end you would stand up and applaud if such exhibitionism weren’t so utterly at odds with what you’ve just seen.

Instead you simply sit there, smile or maybe even dab with a finger at the corner of your eye. Puzzle is such a film. It stars Kelly Macdonald, the brilliant Scottish actress whose ability to play a sweet, uncomplaining example of what the Americans call homemakers was recognised years ago by the Coen brothers.

Her performance as Carla Jean, the meek loving, anxious wife of Josh Brolin’s ill-fated Llewelyn Moss in the Coens’ 2007 masterpiece No Country For Old Men was one of that great film’s many pleasures.

But in Puzzle, Macdonald’s exquisite performance as an unassuming, unassertive, devoutly Catholic homemaker is the principle pleasure; all the picture’s other virtues radiate from it. She plays Agnes, whom is both cherished by her blue-collar New England family and taken completely for granted.

At the start, someone is celebrating a birthday. Agnes carries a cake ceremoniously into the room, but in fact the birthday is hers. She has made the cake, bought the candles, lit them, and now she blows them out, a deeply reluctant object of attention.

Her principle purpose in life, other than to attend Bible classes, is to care for her husband Louie (David Denman), who runs a car-repair workshop, and their two teenage sons, Ziggy (Bubba Weiler) and Gabe (Austin Abrams). She sees it that way, and so do they.

At first, her domestic drudgery and its drab backdrop, even the clothes she wears, suggest a period piece, a story of small-town America perhaps set in the 1950s.

We only learn this is the present because one of Agnes’s gifts is a modern smartphone. She does not welcome it – “like carrying a little alien robot in your purse”, she says – but is delighted to receive a challenging 1,000-piece jigsaw, which she completes in no time, then breaks it up and does it again. It is a map of the world, an irony not lost on us, even if it is on her; Agnes is the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, but could hardly be less worldly.

The short journey to New York counts as a daring adventure for Agnes. But she undertakes it, because only there, in a shop called Puzzle Mania, can she find more jigsaws like the one she has just completed.

She also finds an advert, “Champion Desperately Seeking Puzzle Partner”, and digging even deeper into reserves of boldness she didn’t know she had, answers it.

 

THIS leads her to a wealthy, lonely Robert, a man as urbane as she is provincial, played with quirky, beguiling charisma by Irrfan Khan. The unlikely duo start practising for a doubles competition in the National Jigsaw Puzzle Championships.

If they win, they will go on to the world championships in Belgium. They appear to have a chance, because Agnes has a genius for competitive puzzling that leaves even Robert agog.

But what this also means is that she must somehow explain to her husband why she’s no longer reliably at home every afternoon, preparing his dinner and darning his socks.

Certainly, a lesser drama would make him a demanding brute. But Louie is a decent cove who adores his wife, albeit preferably on his own terms. She is his puzzle, and maybe that’s the significance of the film’s title, because actually jigsaws are an irrelevance, though a delightfully wholesome one.

Agnes could have demonstrated a rare talent for juggling or mental arithmetic and the one-line synopsis would still be the same: a middle-aged woman seeing beyond the narrow horizons’ life seemed to have mapped out for her.

Moreover, as she grows in confidence, she begins to take charge of the relationships with the men in her life – Louie, her boys, even Robert. She learns how to be assertive with more than just jigsaw pieces.

Of course, this kind of personal growth is not exactly original cinematic territory – in fact, Puzzle is directly inspired by a 2009 Argentinian movie. But nothing about it feels derivative or predictable.

Marc Turtletaub, a first-time director, has made a terrific job of shaping the screenplay (by Oren Moverman and Polly Mann) into a sensitive and very moving film. Hats off to the whole production team for a very lovely film.

Verdict: Charming and captivating

★★★★★

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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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