JOURNEY'S END - Day 3 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

Saul Dibb (SUITE FRANCAISE, THE DUCHESS) has directed what is the stand out film of this year's festival to date, an adaptation of R C Sherriff's stage play JOURNEY'S END.  This powerfully tragic tale of men on the front line in World War One has been brought from stage to screen still depicting the claustrophobia and tension of trench warfare without ever feeling "stagey" or merely a west end show with a camera put in front of it. Rather, Dibb uses his Welsh location to good effect - his film beautifully depicts the mists rising above the trench, and one can almost feel the damp, stale air.  And his use of candlelight inside the dug-out is atmospheric and sometimes even beautiful. 

The movie begins with a naive new officer requesting to join C Company in St Quentin, France, just as the troops are rotated onto the front line. Raleigh (Asa Butterfield) is full of that Dulce Et Decorum Est spirit, but is shocked to find that his schoolboy mentor Stanhope (Sam Claflin) has become a superb commander but also a cynical and volatile alcoholic - something that Stanhope is painfully aware of and scared Raleigh will tell his sister, Stanhope's beloved.  Thus it falls to Stanhope's two junior officers to take Raleigh under their wing - there's the affable, modest, epitome of the stiff-upper-lip, "Uncle" (Paul Bettany) and the working class jovial Trotter (Stephen Graham).  The officers are rounded out by Hibbert (Tom Sturridge) - a ladies man who may or may not be faking neuralgia to get away from the front - something that Stanhope is not having anything of.

Much of the action takes place in and around the officer's dugout as they unwillingly accede to an order for a near-suicide mission to fetch intelligence from enemy lines; and then as the men face a heavy bombardment for the start of the German's Spring Offensive. I found myself physically tensing throughout, I was so involved in the fate of the characters. In such an intense environment, one sees Uncle adopt an air of calm indifference and studied bonhomie to offset Stanhope's nasty aggression.  And it's the play between the two that's really at the heart of this film.  If Bettany's performance is the most instantly likeable it's Claflin who steals the movie. There's a deep and desperate vulnerability to Stanhope that reasserts itself in the film's final scenes. It's a bravura and committed performance that deserves award season recognition. 

JOURNEY'S END has a running time of 107 minutes and played Toronto and London 2017. It will be released in the UK on Feb 2nd. 

SUITE FRANCAISE

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In World War Two, Irene Nerimovsky penned the first two parts of a novel before being sent to her death in Auschwitz.  Sixty years later, her daughter discovered and published those two self-contained novellas as Suite Francaise and it became a literary sensation, perhaps more because of the romance of its discovery than the work itself.  We now have this movie adaptation of the book, focussing heavily on the second part - the love story between a French woman and a Nazi soldier- that starts with a depiction of the exodus from Paris that forms the first novella.

THE DUCHESS - hollow

I came to Amanda Foreman's biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, as someone passionately interested in the politics of the late 18th century - particularly the relationship between Fox and Pitt the Younger, and the impact of the French revolution on British political culture. I was drawn to the book because of Amanda Foreman's thesis that Georgiana, as wife of a powerful Whig patron, had a profound influence of the role of women in electioneering, by deliberately exploiting her influence as a woman of fashion.

I was far less interested in the social history of Georgiana. Yes, it is tragic that she was trapped in a loveless marriage, legally her husband's property and valued only as a means to produce an heir. But this is the history of many women before the late twentieth century and one might as well read THE FORSYTE SAGA or histories of Marie-Antoinette. That Georgiana, like Marie-Antoinette, masked her troubles at the gaming tables was also not especially interesting to me. I found it far more fascinating that men who would rule the country and its finances, such as Fox, would game all night and politick all day.

It seemed to me that the biography sold because of readers' prurient interest in the fact that the Duke of Devonshire kept his mistres, the Duchess' best friend, Lady Elizabeth Foster, in the same house as his wife, apparently with his wife's consent. This new film panders to that prurience, especially in its ill-judged marketing campaign.

By stripping away the social and political context - the gambling, the significance of the electioneering, the profound disruption of revolutionary politics - the film becomes a mono-dimensional romantic drama. Naive young Georgiana is excited to make a dazzling marriage into the very pinnacle of society. But her husband is uncommunicative and, given her failure to produce a male heir, disrespectful. He callously keeps his lover, her best friend, in their house(s). And when Georgiana finds some happiness with her lover, the Duke forces her to renounce him and their love-child, or to give up her legitimate children. Georgiana does the honourable thing - after all, this is a woman so maternal that she has raised the Duke's illegitimate child as her own.

This hard-boiled story was not enough to satisfy me. The Duke (Ralph Fiennes) is a void - a misogynistic adulterer who communicates nothing. The mistress (Hayley Atwell) is insufficiently drawn and given insufficient motive. She knives her best friend so as to see her children. Very well. But Atwell is given little scope to make her seem sympathetic or even interesting. And she and Fiennes have no sexual chemistry. The Duchess (Keira Knightley) is again rather one-dimensional. Stripped of her gambling addiction, and made to renounce her lover for the noblest of reasons, she is so virtuous as to be uninteresting. That said, Keira Knightley gives a nuanced performance that brings her to life more than one could've expected given the script. This is a good performance. It's not, let's say right away, Oscar-worthy. Sadly, Dominic Cooper is rather out of his depth as her lover, Grey. He lacks the gravitas to play a potential Prime Minister, and speaks with a pronounced Estuary accent.

Will the film get away with the hollowness and thinness at its centre? Perhaps. Audiences will wallow in its lush period settings and handsome costumes. Charlotte Rampling gives a fine cameo performance as the Duchess' mother and Simon McBurney is typically captivating as Fox. Still, this could have been a far more substantial film, either in terms of content (if they had tackled the politics and gambling head on), or in terms of the visual style (if they had taken a more daring approach, as with Sophia Coppola's MARIE-ANTOINETTE.)

THE DUCHESS is on release in the UK. It is released in the US on September 19th; in Hong Kong on October 1st; in Australia on October 2nd; in France on November 12th; in Israel on November 13th; in Belgium on December 3rd; in Italy on December 23rd; in Finland on January 9th and in the Netherlands on January 15th.