HAMNET***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 6

HAMNET is the story of a happy loving family, heartbroken by grief, and allowed to find some kind of catharsis through art.  It just so happens that the family are Will and Agnes Shakespeare, married for love in Stratford, parents to three wonderful children.  While Will is in London putting on his latest play at The Globe, the bubonic plague strikes, and takes away his young son Hamnet.  In her desperate grief, Agnes lashes out at Will, and he gives his son another life in the tragedy of what would have been seen as the same name in that era.  A grieving mother can see her son full-grown, and acting out his dream of being on the stage. It’s a moment of wonderful emotional release.

Writer-director Chloe Zao (NOMADLAND) has created an utterly beautiful, sensitive and heart-breaking adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s critically acclaimed and beloved novel Hamnet.  She has a sure visual sense and an eye for hauntingly beautiful staging. This is, however, a movie that showcases performances above all. AsJessie Buckley has been raw and vulnerable and brilliant for years, but with Agnes she has finally found a big mainstream movie that could see her get her flowers.  This is her movie and my god she is its very heart and soul.  But let’s not discount Paul Mescal as Will Shakespeare.  The scene where he breaks down backstage at The Globe is just heart-wrenchingly well done. And finally, a massive amount of praise is due to young Jacobi Jupe who plays Hamnet, and in a master-stroke of casting is the real-life younger brother of the actor who plays Hamlet.  

I cannot say any more than that I would not change a single frame of this film. I loved the book and love this adaptation.  It is a deceptively pure and simple tale, told with restraint when needed, and full-throated emotion for impact. It is a stunning piece of work.

HAMNET has a running time of 125 minutes. It played Telluride, Toronto and London. It opens in the USA on November 27th and in the UK on January 9th.

An incomplete review of HEDDA* - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Official Competition

Tessa Thompson (Westworld) gives a career-endingly bad performance in the title role of this risible adaptation of Ibsen.  It was so bad I gasped after her first sentence, committed myself to seeing if it settled down, but simply left after thirty minutes of aural torture. I am not sure what she was going for. Maybe Vanessa Kirby as Princess Margaret in The Crown? It is so affected and so arch I can only assume it was an actual choice but Christ alive why did none of the British cast members say anything?

What else can I say about my brief interaction with this film?  I am not entirely sure why it was updated from Ibsen’s original period and setting to 1950s Britain, as opposed to, say, a contemporary setting. It allows for some lovely frocks.  But maybe writer-director Nia DaCosta (THE MARVELS) was on the verge of saying something interesting about the sexual and cultural mores of the time? Who can tell.  She certainly did NOT seem to be interested in interrogating the presence of a rich, nepo-baby black woman in white society in the 30 minutes I watched.  And I suspect, given the flashy superficial mise-en-scene, that recasting Hedda’s former lover as a woman (Nina Hoss - apparently scene-stealingly brilliant) was more stunt than nuanced take on queer love in the fifties.  As soon as they started dancing to a version of Bjork’s It’s Oh So Quiet I made my move.  This is not the film for me. I am afraid I just could not get passed the horrific fake accent.

HEDDA is rated R and has a running time of 107 minutes. It played Toronto and London and will be streaming on Amazon Prime on October 29th.

HAIR, PAPER, WATER…* - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Official Competition

Trương Minh Quý and Nicolas Graux’s documentary HAIR, PAPER, water… is a proper art house movie, which means that I am really pleased that it exists and has an audience, and I am sure there people out there who will adore it, but that it’s a bit too left-field for my taste.  The film focuses on a real-life great-grandma who lives in thickly-forested rural Vietnam with her extended family, speaking a vanishing dialect and practising homeopathic medicine. It’s rather lovely derping around with her and seeing a world we would not normally have access to - her reactions to seeing people living in high-rises is particularly acute.  But the fun all turns sour when we see her recommend breathing in botanically scented steam as a cure for Covid, or her great-grandson lament that without learning to read and getting an education he will be trapped. Despite its short running time, the film tried my patience.  I think the directors are making a point with their 16mil lending, trying to create a feeling of intimacy and organic filming?  But I really would have enjoyed luxuriating more in the visuals and less of the ancient wisdom that is hard to swallow in these RFK Jr infected time. Your mileage may vary on that score, admittedly.

HAIR, PAPER, WATER… has a running time of 71 minutes. It played Busan and London 2025, where it is has been selected for the Official Competition.

THE CHORAL*** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 5

THE CHORAL is an earnest, often twee but ultimately rather moving film about a fictional choir in a Northern town putting on a performance of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius in the midst of World War One.  Death looms over the entire film. It opens with a young lad delivering telegrams to mothers and wives reporting the death of their loved ones at the Front.  The Choral has to recruit new men to take up the places of those fighting, or worse, killed. The pianist leaves to join up.  We see men carried off to war on one train, and invalids return on the next.  In this context, one might ask about the relevance of a libretto focussed on an old man dying and a fight for his immortal soul.  And so the choirmaster recuts and recasts the oratorio as the story of a young soldier killed in France, with the angel beckoning him to Paradise recast as a young nurse calling him home.

The film is taken at a measured pace that I occasionally found too languorous. It is handsomely directed by Nicholas Hytner but I found the production design rather Farrow and Ball - curated to within an inch of its life - all eggshell blues and taupe.  Similarly, while the film is handsomely acted by an ensemble cast led by Ralph Fiennes and Roger Allum, I often felt that the script didn’t give them enough to do.  I would have loved to have seen the love story between the choirmaster and the pianist developed a little more. That said, there is a rather smashing cameo from Simon Russell Beale as a bloviating Elgar.  And among the younger cast members I was particularly impressed by the young actor playing the lead tenor whose name I cannot find on IMDB.  It’s also worth saying that the music is beautifully done, including a bravura fifteen minute compressed version of the concert by George Fenton.  Truly, to quote the choirmaster Dr Guthrie, “art does come from art”.

The script is by the legendary national treasure Alan Bennett, and features his trademark wry and often deadpan wit.  There are plenty of chuckles.  I was, however, surprised by just how frank this film is about sex. One of the choristers is a prostitute, and unsurprisingly a couple of the young lads going to war are obsessed with losing their virginity before they go.  This side of the film sometimes sits awkwardly with the more “heritage” tone of the rest of the piece, but I think that’s the point. These are just young lads, then as now.  And we sent them off to die.  It’s hard not to get caught up in the emotion of that final scene. 

THE CHORAL has a running time of 113 minutes and is rated R. It played Toronto and London. It opens in the UK on November 7th and in the USA on December 25th.

DIAMONDS IN THE SAND**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025

Filipino director Janus Victoria is nominated for the Sutherland Trophy for debut feature for her film DIAMONDS IN THE SAND. It’s a low-key, low-budget, utterly charming dramedy that takes us into a world we might never have otherwise encountered.  

The iconic Lily Franky (SHOPLIFTERS) plays Yoji, a deeply lonely middle-aged salary-man in Tokyo.  He is shocked into action when he one day discovers his neighbour’s decomposing remnants - apparently a tragic end so common in Japan that it has its own terminology and specialist cleaning services. And then his aged mother passes away, apparently warning him of his own sure fate. So when he forms a tentative friendship with his late mother’s carer, Minerva (Maria Isabel Lopez), he throws caution to the wind and follows her back to the Philippines for a holiday.  While there Yoji discovers a ramshackle, poor but friendly neighbourhood full of casual invitations to supper and real community spirit.  He meets Minerva’s newly graduating daughter Angel, and the rogueish gambling addict Uncle Toto. 

There’s always a tension in the film as to how transactional the relationships are.  Yoji is clearly much wealthier than his newfound friends. And Angel laments the futility of studying when she will earn more as a carer in Japan.  Meanwhile Minerva regrets that whoever is in power in Manila, the drug-related violence and corruption endures. Despite the harsh reality and uneasy cross-cultural tensions, DIAMONDS IN THE SAND retains its optimistic belief in the power and indeed desperate importance of human connection.  It is a film that is full of a nuanced understanding of the world it is depicting, and is full of compassion. Kudos to the director and all involved in so vividly realising memorable people and a sense of place on a micro budget.

DIAMONDS IN THE SAND has a running time of 102 minutes.

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE aka ANN LEE* - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Official Competition

Elvis Costello once wrote a song called “All This Useless Beauty”: an apt description of THE BRUTALIST co-writer and producer, Mona Fastvold’s new film, THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE.  It’s not that it’s badly put together. Indeed, the cinematography, costume and production design are rather handsome.  (Not that you can appreciate the cinematography on the Curzon Mayfair’s cream-crackered projector.). Fastvold is clearly a deeply skilled film-maker and has a sure and unique visual style and the courage to do something really audacious in putting music and movement at the heart of the film. Daniel Blumberg’s score takes inspiration from actual Shaker folk music and the choreography of the cult sect shaking and beating their chests to the music is genuinely mesmerising. In the words of my husband, if this film had been a thirty-minute piece of experimenta mashing up the dance numbers it would have been a banger.

But no. What we have here is the Wikipedia entry for Ann Lee rendered as a film. Born in 18th century Manchester in a Quaker community she joins a sect known for its “shaking”.  She loses four children in infancy, is persecuted for her faith, and develops the belief that she is literally the second coming of Christ.  She takes her followers to New York and eventually founds a religious community in the middle of Bumblefuck.  She continues to be prosecuted for refusing to take sides in the American War of Independence, then dies.

Fastvold and Brady Corbet’s script has no interest in interrogating any of Ann Lee’s religious claims and shows no interest in the interiority of any of the characters.  The utter sincerity of the film shocked me. It read like a propaganda piece for a cult.  Every now and then there would be flickers of potential interest: ooh, is the husband a sado-masochist?! Is the brother gay?! Is Ann a eunuch?! But no.  Nothing so prurient or interesting.  Ann is just taken as what she is: a pioneering female religious leader with a decent following of her fellow nutters.  Indeed she really is a saint according to this film.  Observe the one liner where she shames slave traders, or the other one liner where her people have the condescension to learn woodworking from the First Nations. She must be a good person, right?

I just feel really sad that some really talented film-makers got together and harnessed all of their earnest intentions to create such an utterly uncurious and irrelevant film. What a waste.

ANN LEE has a running time of 137 minutes.  It played Venice, Toronto and London. It does not yet have a commercial release date.