THE KEEPING ROOM - LFF14 - Day Seven

In the final months of the American civil war General Sherman undertook his March to the Sea enacting a policy of ruthless property destruction designed to bring a swift capitulation of the South.  Looting was officially forbidden but clearly occurred, and the men being away at war, it was the women who bore the brunt of the destruction.  In the new film from British director Daniel Barber (HARRY BROWN) we see what happens when three women have to deal with this threat - a minutely observed and incredibly tense study of what happens to normal people in extra-ordinary circumstances - much in the tradition of Susanne Bier. 

Two of the women are sisters - the elder Augusta (Brit Marling) is realistic about their situation - starving, forced to manual labour, and living in the keeping/store room rather than the old great house.  The younger, Louisa (Hailee Steinfeld) starts the film as naive and wilful and cruel, particularly toward the Mad (Muna Otaru) - their slave.  But what we quickly see is that the need to survive has made these women equals of a sort. Mad has a wisdom born of painful experience that the other women come to admire and in a particularly potent scene early on we see that Mad knows her value.

The first half hour of the film is an exercise is almost tortuously slow ratcheting up of tension.  We see through Augusta's eyes the hollowing out of village life - death, fear and the advance scouts of the Union army. In the final hour, those scouts come to the keeping room and the movie becomes a tense cat and mouse shoot out. Intertwined with this is a kind of tentative attraction between Augusta and one of the men, who may well have the capacity to be decent, and is as much a victim of the brutalisation of war.

I can't tell you how much I fell for this movie after some misgivings about the pacing at the start. Like THE DROP, it's a slow burn but worth sticking with.  The austerity of it is breathtaking.  It's also one of the few movies where, when the final scene rolls, I really wanted a sequel to show what happened next to those characters, so much had I taken them to my heart. We rarely see strong women on screen, let alone women who have a relationship with each other - the female dramatic version of the bromance.  Accordingly, this movie is an absolutely treat. Kudos to all involved.

THE KEEPING ROOM has a running time of 95 minutes.  The movie played Toronto and London 2014 and does not yet have a commercial release date.

THE COMPANY YOU KEEP

It turns out I was almost perfectly primed for Robert Redford's earnest new thriller, THE COMPANY YOU KEEP. I'd spent much of the year compiling playlists from Monterey, Woodstock and Altamont, as well as reading Thomas Mallon's superb fictional account of Watergate, and in doing so became fascinated with the politics of the time, the apparently high stakes, the desperation of the students being koshed at Kent State.  What would it have taken to turn a liberal-thinking, frustrated student into a militant radical along the lines of Baader-Meinhof?  This seems to be a fascinating question.  If I ad been alive then, how would I have reacted?  This isn't the first time I've been obsessed with this kind of practical historical moral dilemma.  I've always wondered whether I and my friends, Oxbridge contemporaries, would've been tempted to spy for the Soviets when faced with the seemingly unstoppable march of European fascism.

At any rate, for whatever personal obsessive reasons, THE COMPANY YOU KEEP found me primed.  As the movie opens a middle-aged woman (Susan Sarandon) hands herself into the FBI, admitting culpability in a radical political bank robbery that took place in the 1960s.  In doing so, she threatens the anonymity of her fellow radicals.  The most prominent of these is a small town lawyer played by Robert Redford, who in a Bourne-like road thriller, has to evade the gaze of both the Feds and Shia LaBeouf's investigative reporter, as he races to connect with his former lover and fellow radical, played by Julie Christie.  His road trip takes him across America and back through time, uncovering the complicity of cops and students alike.  

At times, Redford's ability to call in cameos from marquee name actors - Nick Nolte, Chris Cooper, Stanley Tucci - became a little distracting, but ultimately the clear lines and swift pacing kept me on track.  Whether or not it was plausible that a man of Redford's age could successfully go on the lam as he did, I was hooked by the bait of the final meeting between Redford's mellowing father and his still-radical former lover.   The final confrontation is essentially a talky set-piece, but I found it fascinating.  I loved the genuine respect and even-handedness accorded to each side of the debate, but was all the more disappointed when that was undercut by the final choice of a main character.  Ultimately, we are left with the question of whether familial concerns trump wider political concerns, and the movie clearly comes down on one side of this question.  It is, then, a deeply bourgeois piece, and the worse for it.

THE COMPANY YOU KEEP played Venice and Toronto 2012 and opened last year in Italy. It opened earlier this year in Sweden and is currently on release in the UAE and the USA. It opens next week in Israel and Portugal and on April 18th in Australia and Brazil. It opens on April 26yth in Finland, on May 2nd in New Zealand, on May 8th in Belgium and France, on May 23rd in the Netherlands, on June 7th in the UK, on June 20th in Argentina, on July 11th in Greece and on July 25th in Germany.

The movie is rated R and has a running time of 120 minutes.