ON CHESIL BEACH - Day 5 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

ON CHESIL BEACH is a very well acted and shot adaptation of Ian McEwan's novella right up until the point whether the author tacks on a two-part time-jumping epilogue that ruins the logic of the film.  More of that after the end credits of this review, in case you want to be kept spoiler free.

The movie starts in a hotel room in a British sea-side resort in the early 60s. A young couple nervously attempt to have sex on their wedding night, but both are inexperienced.  In flashbacks we discover that the girl, Florence (Saoirse Ronan) is an upper-middle class Oxford graduate attempting to make a career as a concert violinist. She comes from snobbish parents (Emily Watson and Samuel West) who have raised her in an incredibly conservative manner. She has attempted to rebel against their snobbery, partly by marrying Edward (Billy Howle), but retains an intense fear of sex.  The flashbacks also allow us to learn more about Edward, a lower middle class boy (but oh how that tiny gradation in class looms large!) whose father is a primary school teacher and whose mother has suffered brain damage. He's also has a first class degree, but from UCL and is currently somewhat drifting in life.  Marriage to Florence thus gives him a job and financial stability.

The beauty of the book and the film is that there's no doubt that the couple love each other. Indeed, that is it's central tragedy. But poor Florence is frigid, for reasons hinted at but made far more explicit in the movie. And poor Edward is too young and insecure to know how to handle her reaction, and instinctively blames it on class rather than emotional trauma. We see more of his family life in this adaptation and I really loved Anne-Marie Duff's performance as Edward's mother - in fact I would argue that this storyline is really the heartbreaking part of the film.  The main story is of course moving and well acted but the choice of epilogue makes Florence less sympathetic.  This isn't a problem per se, it's just that the subsequent actions jar with the portrayal of Florence that we see in the majority of the film.

ON CHESIL BEACH has a running time of 110 minutes. The film played Toronto and London 2017 and opens in the UK on Jan 19th.

Spoilers for the film:  What particularly flummoxed Meester Phil was how Florence could go from being so traumatised by sexual abuse that she couldn't face sex with Edward to being happily married and pregnant three years later. 

THE LAST STATION - patronising and superficial

THE LAST STATION is a lavishly produced but patronising biopic of Leo Tolstoy's last years - when he was the world's most famous author, but had turned his back on literary fame to pursue a life as a natural philosopher and advocate of interior spirituality and an austere life of renunciation. The movie is written and directed by Michael Hoffman - a director with a somewhat patchy history. In the early 1990s, he directed the scabrous network TV satire SOAPDISH but then settled into much more banal fare such as the Clooney-Pfeiffer rom-com ONE FINE DAY and the warmly photographed but morally equivocal curio THE EMPEROR'S CLUB. THE LAST STATION is also a rather odd film. The warm glow of its lavish photography (Sebastian Edschmid) and the beautiful production design (Patrizia von Brandestein) lend the whole enterprise a Merchant-Ivory glow. Who wouldn't want to be sitting in the real Yasnaya Polyana drinking tea with jam and listening to opera? Everything is wonderfully appointed and nothing more so that the fine cast. There may be grumblings about Anthony Hopkins and Meryl Streep pulling out of their roles as the ageing Lev and his wife Sofya, but their replacements, Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren are no less weighty. And in his typical role as callow naive voyeur we have James McAvoy, fresh from his apparent success in ATONEMENT, as Lev's secretary Valentin. This being a sort of Merchant Ivory world in which weighty literary stuff slips easily down the throat, Valentin has a love interest - an independent young woman called Masha (ROME's Kerry Condon). Naturally, in a world where all intellectual brain-ache has been banished, we shall be led through the story by our charming ingenu Valentin, and have the larger issue of Love versus Rules thought through by Valentin and Masha.

The tragedy of this film is that it had the real locations and a fine cast and production team at its disposal but chose to create nothing more complicated than a soupy melodrama. Sofya is the matriarch who loves her husband and is proud of his fiction but is contemptuous of the men who would turn his Confession into dogma, and steal her children's inheritance into the bargain. This could have been tragic: a woman of genuine nobility and strength forced to flatter and manipulate and throw hysterics in order to be heard. But Helen Mirren's broad performance plays right out of the newspaper reports that Chertkov would've been planting. Plummer's Tolsoy could have been more tragic still - a deperately intelligent man who is forced to hurt the one he loves in order to move forward with what he thinks is his larger plan - or a tragic buffoon manipulated by the ideologues who want to use his name and claim the copyright on his novels. Who knows? Michael Hoffman makes him a jovial old cock, but nothing more. He never acts but is acted upon. It is a curious void at the centre of the film. I have little to say about the character of Valentin other than that this is a rather stereotypical role for McAvoy and rather unworthy of the opposing (and fictional) character Masha. Kerry Condon is impressive - the only actor who seems to be embracing some kind of truth, but she has little to do. And as for Paul Giamatti's Chertkov, wouldn't it have been more interesting to make him sympathetic? To have us believe that he genuinely cares for, and believes in, Tolstoy, rather than being a cartoon-villain puritan and chancer.

What I'm trying to say is that, at the start of this film, we have established the dramatic tension within ten minutes. Sofya loves Tolstoy and wants his attention and his money. Chertkov loves Tolstoy and wants his name and his money. Sofya shouts and schemes. Chertkov wheedles and schemes. Tolstoy hobbles about between the two and then carc's it in a provincial train station. If you want to make a movie on this subject matter that sustains itself for two hours you have to be willing to dig deeper into motives and to play in shades of grey. You have to be willing to roll up your sleeeves and deal in moral ambiguities as well as in moral certainties. You can't just loll about in beautifully photographed countryside bouncing the same argument back and forth like the world's most dull tennis match.

Additional tags: Michael Hoffman, Kerry Condon, Patrick Kennedy, John Sessions, Sergei Yevtushenko, Sebastian Edschmid, Patrizia von Bradenstein

THE LAST STATION played Telluride 2009 and was released in the US, Canada, Germany and Austria earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and opens next weekend in the Netherlands. It opens in Singapore on March 4th and in Switzerland on April 1st. Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer have been nominated both for Golden Globes and Academy Awards.

NOWHERE BOY - suprisingly conventional Lennon biopic

NOWHERE BOY is a beautifully written, beautifully acted, sensitively directed biopic of the young John Lennon, directed by the reknowned British artist, Sam Taylor-Wood. Set in a perfectly rendered 1950s Liverpool, the film shows a 17 year old Lennon groping toward the truth of why he lives with his Aunt Mimi rather than with his mum and dad, not to mention taking his first steps toward becoming a Beatle.

Aaron Johnson (THE THIEF LORD; ANGUS, THONGS AND PERFECT SNOGGING) is assured as the young Lennon, complete with rock-n-roll quiff and iconic Scouse accent. He pulls off both the cockey laddishness and the vulnerability. His John is witty and playful; promiscuous and arrogant; occasionally violently angry; but also desperately adrift. Kristin Scott-Thomas also gives a nuanced performance as John's Aunt Mimi - both stiff and severe in her middle-class home, but also undoubtedly very loving toward John and possessing a wicked sense of humour. (And to those reviewers criticising Scott Thomas for being too posh, Mimi really didn't have a broad Scouse accent. Indeed, Lennon later commented that he had to broaden his Scouse accent for PR purposes.)

The character that jumps off the screen is John's mum, and Mimi's younger sister, Julia. Anne-Marie Duff's Julia is so full of energy and fun that she simply sweeps you up in her love of life and rock'n'roll music. But like John you can't help but feel something is forced in such buoyancy and we're right to distrust it. Despite being remarried with two small children, Julia obviously suffers from depression and can only truly relate to men through flirtation. This extends to John and his band members, and the delicate way in which Sam Taylor-Wood and her script-writer deal with this is both honest and elegant.

The resulting film is a moving emotional drama that is interesting on its own terms, let alone because it formed an iconic musician.

NOWHERE BOY is a very good film. It reminded me a lot of Tom Ford's feature debut A SINGLE MAN, in that it was both apparently conventional in its structure and visual style but also wonderfully brave in tackling uncomfortable subjects head on, without judgement and without cliché. The conventional style is even more surprising from Taylor-Wood given the nature of her graphic art, and her bizarre short film.

NOWHERE BOY closed London 2009 and is currently on release in the UK and Australia. It will play Sundance 2010. It opens in New Zealand on March 4th; in the Netherlands on April 1st; in Russia on April 15th and in Norway on September 10th.

THE WAITING ROOM - modern life is rubbish

Real life is drab. Grey skies, banal relationships, sitting on grubby trains pulling into worn out railway stations. People stay in crap relationships through inertia and the man/woman of your dreams walks by on the platform. THE WAITING ROOM is an earnest, well-acted drama that faithfully transcribes all this dreariness and the result is one of the most boring movies I have ever seen. Anne-Marie Duff and Ralf Little play two nice people who meet by chance in a railway station waiting room but don't act on their mutual attraction because they are both stuck in unfulfilling relationships. The rest of the film sees them mope around until they finally meet again and hold hands. Seriously. That's it.

THE WAITING ROOM was released in the UK last summer and is available on DVD.