MARY & GEORGE (TV)****

MARY & GEORGE is a sumptuously produced costume drama set in the court of King James I of England. Despite being known to most English schoolchildren as the sponsor of a new translation of the Bible, historical sources tell us that he was definitely homosocial and most likely bi- or homosexual.  In this retelling from D.C.Moore, based on a work of history by Benjamin Woolley, any ambiguity is eradicated. James was most definitely homosexual - able to sire children with his Danish Queen - but taking pleasure in a series of young beautiful men.

This gives our heroine Mary Beaumont her chance at societal advancement, wealth and power. Born a serving woman, by the time we meet her she has already successfully faked an aristocratic lineage and buried her first husband. She marries a country booby in order to maintain her children, and grooms her son George to seduce the King. That they both achieve great power and set up her descendants as those the Dukes of Buckingham is a testament to Mary's intelligence, ruthlessness and strategic brilliance. 

Iconic actress Julianne Moore (MAY DECEMBER) perfectly embodies this complex and ambiguous woman. She is no feminist - happily sacrificing a rich heiress to her mentally ill and violent younger son. But one cannot help but admire her resilience and resourcefulness in a world where she had no lineage and few legal rights. It is testament to Nicholas Galitzine (RED, WHITE & ROYAL BLUE) that he matches her beat for beat. When we first meet his George he is young, fragile and drifting. By the end he is out-strategising both his mother and the King. He remains compelling throughout. In smaller roles, I admired Tony Curran's ability to make James so much more complex and indeed admirable than just a "cockstruck" dilettante. I also very much liked Sean Gilder as Mary's new husband, and Nicola Walker gets all the best lines as the scabrous, independently wealthy Lady Harron.

The production design, costumes, music, and locations are all beautifully done. The show is a joy to watch, and as far as I can tell, the broad historical outlines are close to the real history. My only real criticism of the show is that it cannot maintain the brilliantly funny brutal comedy of its opening episodes and that once the Villiers get closer to power, a dark pall falls over the show.  I felt that somewhere around episode 5 the drama lost its intensity and zest and we drifted toward the inevitable grim ending.  I wanted more of the bawdy language and nakedly open powerplays - notably between Mary and Lady Harron.  The show suffered for the latter's loss.

MARY & GEORGE is available to watch in its entirety in the UK on Sky. It releases next month in the USA on Starz.

THE ZONE OF INTEREST***** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 10

Writer-director Jonathan Glazer's astounding and haunting film THE ZONE OF INTEREST is worthy of all the festival buzz it has received since its world premiere at Cannes.  It is a film that is asks profound and disturbing questions about the morality of ordinary every day people. In stark opposition to ONE LIFE, this film suggests that the base attribute of humanity is indecency rather than decency.

The film is inspired by, rather than an actual adaptation of, Martin Amis' troubling novel of the same name.  Glazer strips away Amis' fictionalising to give us the stark truth of the Auschwitz concentration camp, informed by years of research and access to the site's archives. His film is actually filmed on location, with a replica of the camp Commandant's house built a few hundred yards from the original. There is a deeply authentic and disturbing sense of being in the presence of banal evil - in the landscape we have seen so many times in documentaries and in testimony from SHOAH.

The power of this film lies, I think, in the way in which it is meticulously constructed and the conceptual choices made by Glazer. The film is best described as working on three levels at once: the visual story; the sound design; and the score.

The first level is the visual story.  This is almost entirely that of the Hoess family with much of the action taking place in their house, breaking only as Rudolf is sent to Berlin for a temporary reassignment.  We are ensconced in the every day rhythms of the family - kids getting ready for school or playing in the pool - mother tending to her beloved garden or gossiping with her friends - servants laying the table.  As Hedwig Hoess' mother arrives for a visit we realise just how well this working class couple has done under the Nazi regime. The daughter of a cleaner is now the matriarch in a luxurious villa, with servants, mink coats, jewels. Hedwig has her pick of the luxury items stolen from Jews and despite a rather provincial ugly look clearly has a liking for finery. As for Rudolf he is what his children claimed - a loving father with a fondness of horses. They swim in the lake and paddle in their canoe.  

All of this is depicted with a natural casualness and intimacy that is afforded by strong performances from Christian Friedel (Babylon Berlin) as Rudolf and Sandra Hueller (TONI ERDMANN) as Hedwig. These performances are also enabled by a novel system of fixed cameras that allowed the performers to move through the villa more freely and stay in the moment. 

The key point of the visual narrative that we see the camp walls and the chimneys and the endless smoke but we never actually see the horrors behind those walls. (As such, this film would work well as a companion piece to the similarly formally audacious and haunting SAUL FIA.) This gives the film a kind of deliberate claustrophobia and a tension born of a false division between the idyllic family life and its surroundings. Indeed, the only time we break away from the perspective of the Hoess family is when Glazer uses thermal imaging to show a little Polish girl - almost like the heroine of a fairy tale - leaving a trail of apples and pears for the prisoners in the camp at night. It's as if her innate humanity and goodness can only be shown as the negative of the Nazi evil that we see in broad daylight.

This fake isolation is corrected by the second layer or element of the film which is Johnnie Burn's sound design. Because while we may not see the camp and its victims explicitly, we hear them constantly.  We hear the rumble of trains arriving and the screams of families being separated. We hear gunshots and horses rearing and panicked people.  Most horrifyingly, we hear the incinerators burn. To be fair we also see this in our peripheral vision - the orange lights at night as another selection is made. And we see the impact of this sound - of this actual immersion in murder - on the family. One of the daughters sleep walks. The mother-in-law comes to visit and then flees, unable to stomach the sounds and smell of burning. Rudolf, we later find, has some kind of stomach problem. And even if his conscious mind does not acknowledge the horror, his body is revolting against it. Strangely, it is only the wife Hedwig who seems to exhibit no horror, who is only angry when she thinks she might have to leave "this paradise".

So we have the visual story of what is happening with the family - and then we have the sound design telling us what is happening just outside of our vision. Both of these are scrupulously real and researched and cognitively dissonant. It's the dissonance that makes the film so hard to watch and so haunting.  The third element of this astounding film is Mica Levi's score.  This can only be described as the element that gives us the emotional response to the dissonance - to the truth of Auschwitz and of Hoess descending the final staircase into immorality.  It's a score like something out of a horror film, or how one might imagine Dante's Inferno to sound. It's aurally invasive and unreal and abstract and in some ways cathartic. Amidst this gentle family life, and off-screen constant rumbling machinery of murder, we need something that sounds like, and allows us, to scream in horror.

Part of me wishes Glazer had not broken our entrapment in this nightmare to show us footage of the modern Auschwitz museum. I feel the film may have worked better to not give us that escape, rather to mire us in hell. But this choice does not undercut just what a monumental achievement of cinema this film is. It is by far the most formally brave, and provocative film I have seen this year. 

THE ZONE OF INTEREST has a running time of 106 minutes. It played Cannes 2023 where Mica Levi won the Soundtrack Award, Jonathan Glazer won the FIPRESCI prize and the Grand Prize of the festival. It also played Toronto, Telluride and London 2023.  It opens in the USA on December 15th

CORSAGE - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 3

CORSAGE is a stunning piece of imaginative film-making from writer-director Marie Kreutzer, featuring a memorable performance from Vicky Krieps (THE PHANTOM THREAD) as the iconic Austro-Hungarian Empress Sisi.

Kreutzer's approach is to take a bold ahistorical approach to get to the emotional truth of an incredibly famous, beautiful woman, trapped in a loveless marriage and burdened by the obligations of her public role.  It is similar in approach - though bolder in its leaps of imagination - than Sofia Coppola's MARIE ANTOINETTE - far more successful than Pablo Larrain's hysterical SPENCER, though less honest in its treatment of Sisi's eating disorder.  The key difference is that in both of those movies, the central women were depicted as passive victims, whereas Krieps' Sisi is the architect of her own liberation.

The movie opens with Sisi about to turn 40 in 1870s Vienna, the mother of a teenage Crown Prince and a precocious and dutiful daughter. She is obsessed with her weight, skin and youth, starving herself and riding, fencing and doing gym exercises to maintain her figure. She doesn't want to have sex with her husband, but is also jealous of a young girl that he flirts with. At first we think she is in love with her riding instructor but then realises she just gets off on him (and her husband) looking at her adoringly. As with Princess Diana, we get the impression that she is both trapped by society's superficial and unreal expectations of her, but that she has also internalised these misogynistic expectations of beauty and turned into a narcissist. Certaintly, her treatment of her confidante and lady in waiting speaks to her putting her own happiness before that of all others. 

The wonder of Krieps performance is that Sisi never seems passive or a victim even when she is: she's actually spiky, bitchy, rebellious and wild, to the point of neglecting her duties with her indulgent cousin Ludwig of Bavaria. She's also incredibly athletic and not lying when she says she's a better rider than her instructor. It helps that Kreutzer chooses not to show us the excesses of Sisi - her absurd hair and beauty regimen - her more waspish comments about fat people - her serial infidelities. This is a much less extreme and yet more extreme Sisi - less fat-shaming and more feminist -  one more palatable to contemporary tastes. 

As to the rest of the film I love that Kreutzer shows us people in full costume dress with retinues of obsequious servants but places them in derelict locations filled with anachronistic props. It sounds too on the nose, but it actually works really well to underpin how rotten the edifice of the central European monarchy was at that stage, and the sham of these great imperial monarchs with their rotten teeth and fake beards.  Kreutzer's Sisi just takes that fakery one step further. 

CORSAGE has a running time of 113 minutes. It played Cannes, where Vicky Krieps won an acting prize. It is playing in Official Competition at the BFI London Film Festival. It will be released in the USA on December 23rd and in the UK on December 24th.

THE DIG

THE DIG is an incredibly earnest and prettily produced historical drama, but one that falls prey to lumpen dialogue, heavy-handed politics and cliched character development.  

It's a retelling of the discovery of an Anglo-Saxon burial boat and a cache of rare artefacts in an archaeological dig in Suffolk, in 1939.  The find is familiar to most British schoolchildren, especially if like me you grew up in the area, and many of us took school-trips to see the Sutton Hoo finds. They were revolutionary because of their rarity but also because of how they redefined how we considered the "dark ages".  Through the sophistication of the artefacts, historians could see that Anglo-Saxon culture was actually far more developed than had been presumed.  The film wants to tell us this too - and does so with Basil Exposition levels of clumsiness, usually taking the form of excited declamatory statements from Ken Stott's British Museum archaeologist. 

Archaeology being a fairly dull, painstaking exercise, the screenwriter Moira Buffini decides to add some excitement with a couple of action scenes and a hokey romance. The former take the form of a scene where the gifted amateur archaeologist Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) nearly suffocates when the dig collapses on him, as well as a scene where a RAF pilot crashes into a nearby river.  The latter takes the form of Lily James' archaeologist Peggy Preston realising her husband (Ben Chaplin) is probably gay and at the very least frigid resulting in her having sex with Johnny Flynn's amateur photographer, Stuart Piggott.

Are these spoilers? No, not really. Everything in this film is so clearly telegraphed you can see the character arcs and plot twists coming as soon as the characters are introduced. Lest you ever forget, war is imminent! So we get RAF planes flying overhead at every moment, and this underscores the DOOM that overhangs Carey Mulligan's sick landowner. The inevitable battle between the amateurs and the institutional control freaks at the British Museum is, well, inevitable. And as soon as Lily James turns up in her scantily clad holiday clothes with her frigid husband you can see the affair coming a mile off. 

The politics is heavy handed too. There's a running thread of the Establishment not valuing outsiders - whether it's Mrs Pretty not being allowed to go to university, or Mr Brown not being given credit for the dig, or Peggy Preston being patronised by pretty much everyone except Cousin Stuart. And yet this comes up against an almost Downton Abbey-esque doffing of the flat tweed cap with Mr Brown and his wife grateful for any crumbs of praise from Mrs Pretty. 

What's so annoying about all this is that the film, directed by Simon Stone, is actually well made insofar as it has lovely lush British golden hour country landscape cinematography; a lot of care has been taken over period costumes and art direction; and the cast is first-rate (even in Mulligan is way too young to play Mrs Pretty). It's just all so wasted on such a twee pointless script. I would much rather have watched a doc on Sutton Hoo instead. 

THE DIG is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 112 minutes. It will be released on January 29th 2021.