EMPIRE OF LIGHT - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 8

I'm not going to waste too much time on this review: I've already lost two hours of my life to this horrendously misjudged and borderline offensive film.  I believe writer-director Sam Mendes had earnest good intentions to make a film that explored mental health, racism and the healing power of the arts but he fails comprehensively.  This may be because he'd bitten off too much, or just because he has a tendency to the banal and twee in all his films.

On the mental health front we have Olivia Colman playing a middle-aged woman in a British seaside town in the early 80s. She works in a cinema, and the action of the film will take place among the people who work there. We soon discover that she has just come out of residential care for schizophrenia, and that she's in a pretty exploitative relationship with the cinema's manager (Colin Firth). All of this is good fodder for serious drama, but I can't emphasise how unreal, fake and performed Colman's character feels.  It's a rare mis-step, and maybe it's the writing because we know Colman is a great actor. But this feels to superficial and mishandled. To quote my husband, "do NOT get me started on the mental illness, which appeared to come and go entirely for the convenience of "the plot"."

On racism, we have the displeasure of Sam Mendes trying to tell us what it was like to be a young black man during the rise of the National Front in the character of Stephen (Micheal Ward).  And to add insult to weak writing, Mendes then proceeds to photograph Stephen as an object of desire (fair play I guess, it's from Colman's character's perspective), but the way in which we have a really extended shot of him naked, running into the ocean, made me feel uncomfortable with just how he was being objectified. To quote my husband once more, Mendes' handling of racism was "crass, simplistic and condescending and worse than GREEN BOOK by a long way."

Okay, so to the healing power of the arts, something that descriptions of this film make a big deal of.  The film may be set in a cinema, but it's no CINEMA PARADISO.  The films seem pretty incidental to the action, and the "healing power" consists of Colman's character asking to finally see a film in the final 10 minutes of the movie. It feels so cheap and tacked on and lazy. If you're going to use BEING THERE, then truly use it. And if you're going to cast Toby Jones as the projectionist, then give him something to do worthy of his talent.

In the words of my husband, EMPIRE OF LIGHT ends up as a "half-baked, pretty-looking mess. Deakins made it all look lovely though, and Mendes seemingly going for lots of Kubrickian symmetical framing with slow camera pushes. Edit to the right scenes (without people or dialogue) and you have a nice screensaver."  

EMPIRE OF LIGHT is rated R and has a running time of 119 minutes. It played Toronto and Telluride 2022 and is playing the BFI London Film Festival. It will be released in the USA on December 9th and in the UK on January 13th 2023. 

CYRANO**

 

French poet-playwright Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac has been adapted for screen since the dawn of the silent era - most notably with Steve Martin and Gerard Depardieu taking on the role of the tragic romantic hero.  In this adaptation by Erica Schmidt, from her own successful stage musical., the lead actor is Schmidt's husband and GAME OF THRONES' Peter Dinklage, playing Cyrano as a witty, articulate soldier who is crippled by self-doubt not because of the play's large nose but because of his dwarfism. Cyrano is in love with his childhood friend Roxanne (HALEY BENNETT), but fears she will reject him because of his appearance. So, when she falls for his handsome but inarticulate fellow soldier Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr - THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7), Cyrano offers to write Roxanne love letters on his behalf.

Matters take a grim turn when Roxanne is courted by the rich and predatory De Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn - ROGUE ONE - in full pantomime villain mode), and Cyrano helps Roxanne and Christian marry in secret before the two soldiers are sent to war. 

The resulting film is spare and elegantly constructed but filmed in a maddeningly, almost GODFATHER II chiaroscuro which the pretentious director Joe Wright clearly feels is emblematic of hidden truths and deception.  Poor Ben Mendelsohn is not asked to give a performance of any depth and neither is Kelvin Harrison Jr. There is far more to Haley Bennett's passionate, smart and rebellious Roxanne, although she is made to be so perceptive and witty it's hard to believe she wouldn't a) rumble the ruse and b) love Cyrano for his intellect from the start. There's also something deeply uncomfortable for a modern audience seeing a young woman duped in this way, into a marriage with a man she cannot help but soon find out is not who she thought he was. 

And did I mention this was a musical? With bad music that has a kind of weird country rock feel that works against its setting, costumes and dour, po-faced mood?

The only two reasons to watch this film - and the two stars I have awarded it - are as follows: first, Peter Dinklage is charismatic and compelling and heart-breaking as Cyrano.  Second, there is a particularly good and deeply sad song by soldiers on the eve of battle.

CYRANO has a running time of 123 minutes and is rated PG-13. It is available to rent and own.

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.

THE FALLING - LFF14 - Day Four

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

THE FALLING is a bad film. Badly conceived. Badly acted. A movie that we laugh at rather than laugh with, and that we shouldn't be laughing at or with at all.   It never recovers from the early exit of its most charismatic actress and the conceit of a Crucible-style fit of teenage hysteria is so risibly executed that it becomes absurd but in a bad way. The fiftieth time a girl fainted I said "fuck it" and was sorely tempted to walk out.

So what's the story? It's 1960s England and in a girl's school Lydia (Maisie Williams) is transfixed by her more glamorous and dangerous best friend Abbie (Florence Pugh).  This borderline erotic longing for notice manifests as jealousy as Abbie sleeps with Lydia's brother, and receives the notice of Lydia's agoraphobic mother (Maxine Peake).  Act One of the play sees us experience the raw charisma (and it has to be said superbly naturalistic performance by the actress) of Abbie and when she leaves the film never quite recovers from the whole that she creates.  Moreover, the film lurches from tense psychosexual coming-of-age drama into an attempt at a kind of creepy noir horror as schoolgirls start fainting and having seizures. Is it faked? Is it hysteria? Is there something supernatural going on, as hinted out by the white magic interests of Lydia's brother.  To be frank, after yet another absurdly staged scene of fainting fits in the school hall I really didn't care.

I suspect that what the director Carol Morley (DREAMS OF A LIFE) was trying to go for was a kind of repressed emotions transmitted through acting out culminating in an explosion and epiphany at the end.  If so, the casting is wrong.  Where Florence Pugh is natural and entrancing and Maxine Peake is subtle, traumatised and deeply moving, Maisie Williams acts in a manner that is just altogether too big. I wonder if this is a consequence of her GAME OF THRONES experience where the kind of massive scale epic fantasy requires a kind of larger-than-life performance. At any rate, the director's job is to curb any performances that unbalance the rest of the piece.

Overall, not a great film and a great disappointment after the deeply moving and important DREAMS OF A LIFE.  

THE FALLING has a running time of 102 minutes. The movie does not yet have a commercial release date.