Official Secrets is, like The Report (posted earlier no 7) an exposé of a real life event, in this case the publishing of a document which showed up the background to the pressure used by the United States and its poodle-partner Great Britain to pursue, against all advice or logic, the war against Iraq.
It is an important film, long overdue. Several factors, including financial, delayed its passage and also the hesitance of Katherine Gun herself to revisit this traumatic period in her life.
Gavin Hood‘s film follows the story from start to finish with the full cooperation of the family and others involved, and this was underlined by the fact that KG herself was at the Q&A as was Michael Bright, the journalist on The Observer who broke the story. In the film KG is played by Keira Knightly, oddly with long dark hair, though KG is clearly blonde. the journalist is played by Matt Smith. Also in the audience were the lawyer, Ben Emmerson played in the film by Ralph Fiennes, and KG’s husband played in the film by Adam Bakri and also her father.
Much use is made of contemporary broadcasts and newsreel. Tony Blair and George W Bush play themselves, in every sense of the word.
This is a remarkable story of the protection of people over loyalty to the family. Although KG failed, we should be proud that people like her exist. This is her story and our story and it matters as much today as it did then.
My second film of the day was a World Premiere of Fanny Lye Deliver’d. It is a great film but I cannot write more until all the screenings are over, a request made by BFI itself. So more on that later.
Two absolutely cracking films today. O lucky me and my guests!
The first an historic epic satire from Ciro Guerra, set on the remote borders of the Empire (it was never clear which one, probably a cross between the Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire). It doesn’t matter. The outpost is manned by a Magistrate (Mark Rylance) of poetic sympathy with the surrounding terrain and its nomadic people, a benevolent father figure.
Along comes The Colonel (Johnny Depp – in the most outrageously camp sunglasses that you have ever seen) to investigate the rumours of disruption. His methods are quite the reverse of the magistrate’s, as he soon demonstrates.
Waiting for the Barbarians is a film that can be seen on many levels. The screenplay was written by JM Coetsee, so one can view it through his South African lens; through a perfectly historical lens, where the nomadic tribes may be the precursors of Genghis Khan; through the lens of the present crisis in the Middle East. Whichever way you see it, it is about us and them, or us and the others.
But which are the barbarian? The nomadic hordes whose lands have been appropriated or the ruling elite, who use torture to extract information expecting it to be lies? Which is the enemy, the one outside the walls or the one within?
The second film was a double crossing thriller which moved swiftly through several layers of deception, counter-intelligence, police surveillance and generalised villainy. This non-linear narrative became more and more tortuous, told in chapters of rainbow colours, each chapter being focused on a different character and each new reveal demonstrating more and more double crosses and also using this astonishing whistling language of the Gran Canaria.
The scenery was spellbinding, especially the end which took place in the Gardens of the Bay in Singapore. The credits ran over the vibrant son et lumiere show that there is every night. A travelogue could not have been more persuasive.
The Whistlers is, I think, a carry on from a previous film from Corneliu Porumbola, involving a bent cop, Christi who is persuaded to assist in the lifting of a drug traffiker from police custody. This is police satire and a blood fest, with everyone on the make and double crossing everyone else.
It rattles along at a brisk pace which is energising and smart. The principal actors are very good, but every part was played to its fullest degree, where the villains were all of a piece with the upholders of the law – that is lawless without limits.
Atom Egoyan is no stranger to the London Film Festival and his career has included some pretty odd characters, but none more odd, I suspect, than David Thewlis as a professional food inspector.
The inspiration for the story came from a real life experience when a friend had his restaurant shut down over some infringement of the food hygiene regulations. We should be grateful to these strange and mainly hidden men and women who check the food outlets of all sorts from which we buy our ingredients or consume our meals, as this film shows.
The film opens with Veronica, the daughter, arranging her father’s funeral. He has left strict instructions in his Will that it should take place in a certain church, the priest is puzzled to know why, since as far as anyone knew the man had no faith and did not attend this particular church.
The typically unorthodox approach to story telling explains why this film falls into the Thriller section – films that are nerve-shredders that will get your adrenalin pumping and keep you on the edge of your seat. However, this was such a slow burn that we had time to accustom ourselves to the suspense. This was a good thing because this intricate and interesting story was many-layered.
Food lovers beware though!
Veronica was played by a fairly new actress, Layla de Oliveira, who was stunning as the lead in this complex story, from her childhood as a young musician to her life as a conductor.
Filmed entirely on location in Canada, it was richly coloured and vibrant. As the story unfolds we discover a woman who has lived with her own guilt for a long, long time. A strange coincidence allows her to expiate her trauma in a slightly unfathomable way. All the acting is brilliant. Great film, look out for it.
The second film of the day was also about a young girl whose existence is principally in her own mind. She is clearly agoraphobic and at the beginning of the film has not left her parent’s house for nine months.
It is clear that she has issues with her father, and her mother is hostile to both. She is the second child of parents who lost their first daughter, Juliette in an accident. Clearly they have over -protected Secunda, played by Barbara Giordano, but without showing her much love. A sort of self-protection that has had profound consequences for all of them.
The mother dies and the father leaves…
This also unfurled slowly, but was at the same time a very powerful rendering of the mental anguish that Seconda is suffering. Filmed mostly indoors it had a claustrophobic feel to it, while once Seconda ventures outside we feel her vertiginous disconnect equally. Klaudia Reynicke has absolutely nailed this strange story, it is moving and horrifying in equal measure.
Two great but very different films. The UK premiere of Two Popes, which should be an oxymoron but isn’t today.
The film is basically a two-hander between Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce, by jumping several years with the cinematic device of rolling numbers, we begin at the beginning of the life of the present pope, Francis, who started life as Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
The pope dies and in his place the Conclave of Cardinals elects Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, who becomes Pope Benedict 16th. The film then jumps to a critical year in the Vatican State, when scandals affected members of the Curia and other staff, the fallout from which brought the scandal near to, if not actually known by, Pope Benedict.
Thus we see two men, the Pope and a Cardinal talking; sometimes angrily, sometimes kindly, often warmly and affectionately; what they are discussing will have huge ramifications for the Roman Catholic Church. It is no spoiler here to say that Pope Benedict is telling Bergoglio that he is going to retire, and that he – Bergoglio, a Latin American Jesuit will take on his mantel.
Filmed often quite close up, this intimate and gentle portrait of two men with a personal history that is not without blemish, cast in the role of God’s Representative on Earth, is very moving, tear-jerking in fact.
We cannot possibly know what really passed between these two men, so this film is not history, but an imaginative leap across the bridge: to bring some perspective upon this momentous decision.
The contrasting styles of the two popes is well known, Pope Francis says “the carnival is over” as he rejects the gold pectoral cross and the flummery uniforms, but the point has already been made – the camera often pauses on the gold cross and papal ring and then switches to the silver cross and silver ring of the cardinal. At the time, this was the correctly assumed hierarchy. Pope Francis has done away with all of it. No longer wearing the scarlet shoes and robes, but a simple white cassock.
Everything about this film is balanced: the pace, the acting and the directing and the cinematography. Nothing is over dramatized or extreme, and much use is made of contemporary TV broadcasts, film clips and amateur photographs of the Pope. This is a Netflix production.
The second film, achieved through pouring rain, was A White White Day. A Scandinavian film, from Iceland. Ingvar E Sugurdsson gives a towering performance as an aggrieved, enraged widower whose wife has died in a car accident. As an off-duty policeman, he is required to spend time with a psychiatric counsellor, frankly the most unsympathetic doctor one could imagine, so it is no surprise when Ingimudur trashes his office.
The construct of the film is strange, but evocative and beautiful. We see a house being built over time, shown in shots from the same position, in all weathers and at all times of day, occasionally there are people and sometimes horses…
And so begins the story.
The bleak and unusual landscape and weather patterns of Iceland are as much a part of this film as the story: the snow and the rain but also the strange white mist, which is not quite fog but which turns everything into one thing, neither sky, nor sea nor land.
The director, Hlynur Pálmason has absolutely understood and developed a story around grief, anger and its madness.
The title comes from an Icelandic saying, no one is quite sure where it originated, but in effect it is that on “a white white day, the dead come near enough for us to hear them”.
Three in a day is extreme for me now, but these were irresistible.
Why choose these three? The Song of Names is based on a novel by Norman Lebrecht and took several years to organise and fund, then cast. The complicating factor being that there are two main characters who start as boys of around twelve, progress to young manhood and finally to late middle age about thirty five years later, so when they are in their fifties.
Simultaneously, one of them, a Jewish boy Dovidl, has to play the violin (which the young actor (Luke Doyle) does, is in fact a virtuoso violin player – such luck), more problematic when in his twenties, played by Jonah Hauer-King and in his fifties by Clive Owen. Then three actors are required to play his adoptee brother Martin.
The story surrounds the two boys/men. Dovidl is supposed to play is a concert put on by his surrogate father, but he doesn’t turn up and disappears. Thirty five years later Martin tracks him down and persuades him to play at another concert.
The back story is one of sadness and memory, of faith and religion and deep friendship. Dovidl’s entire family have been destroyed in Treblinka and it is the names of all the people lost in Treblinka about which the song is made, for remembrance, so that they will never be forgotten. I have no idea whether this is a true fact or not, but it is a beautiful idea, so I do hope that it is.
François Girard has created a captivating and intense drama and has brought it off successfully. If you get a chance to see this film it is worth it, though at present it has no UK distribution.
Mr Jones is a docudrama about Gareth Jones, a journalist who interviewed Hitler, tried to warn the British Government about him; then attempted the same coup by interviewing Stalin.
This failed, but he sneaked his way into Ukraine, slipped from his “shadow” and landed up in a train with a lot of very poor and hungry people. This section shot in monochrome (shades of Schindler’s List) shows him eating an orange, the only thing of colour, which he luxuriously peels, chucks the peel away only to have several people dive on it to devour it. Then he shares the rest of the fruit.
He is then forced into a work group where he is loading grain on a lorry bound for Moscow, he asks awkward question and they try to arrest him, fail and fail to shoot him; he wanders through the snowy forest…
What he discovers ends up inspiring George Orwell to write Animal Farm.
This film has an absolutely sterling cast. At its UK premiere members of Gareth Jones family turned out in great numbers. Gareth himself was kidnapped and shot by the USSR secret police.
The final film of the day was a documentary about a group of French people trying to help refugees fleeing through the Roya valley. The local gendarmes break the law by sending the asylum seekers back to Italy, while this group led by Cedric try their best to make their situation legal. The Valley is a controversial film, obviously it shows the local people in a most positive light in regard to their charitable attitude to the refugees.
Their actions however have led to several arrests and prosecutions of the local people who have helped the asylum seekers in any way, most of them still pending verdicts; but as someone in the Q&A pointed out, the more the state harasses and prosecutes the “do-gooders”, the more desperate the refugee asylum seekers become, and this person’s house had been trashed. I can confirm that this does happen, we have a friend who works in Menton and has a house in this valley where she goes at weekends, she now empties her food cupboards and fridge and leaves it all in a box on the step, with a request to leave the house in peace after three or four break-ins where only food and staples were touched.
Two absolutely brilliant and absolutely different films today. First the semi-autobiographical film of the break up of a marriage, by William Nicholson. The story of his parents break up when he was an adult, and he said how difficult that was.
Played by Annette Bening and Bill Nighy, with Josh O’Connor as William, this almost three-hander progresses smoothly through her needy/bitchiness and his passive aggression. He was a teacher, she appeared not to have a job but is in her beautiful home in Seaford compiling an anthology of poetry.
Hope Gap is a film about absence to some extent. Edward is emotionally moving away from Grace, while physically present; William has moved on to live alone in a flat, though evidently his love life was not going according to plan; Grace both held and repelled the two men. She could be both clingy and unkind, and Edward is made to feel permanently in the wrong, which makes him nervous and stiff.
After twenty nine years, or less if you count backwards to the accident, he has known that he will leave her. Surprisingly, to her it comes straight out of the blue.
You see her “death stare” in one short clip in the LFF opening taster. It comes at a pivotal moment, when she is being both her very worst and her best.
Nicholson is a novelist of very fine stories, many of them including people we have already met in others of his books. The film makes clear that he is a wordsmith, but also that he has a very considered vision.
This will be in the cinemas next spring, look out for it.
The Report, which also has Annette Bening in it, is a film about the torture report created through the work of a very small team of selected individuals, who went through thousands of documents and emails showing exactly how and what was happening to internees in black sites after 9/11. How Extreme Interrogation Techniques (which were supposed to create dependency and dread in the victims) did not work, possibly did not produce reliable or credible information and that the CIA who were using these techniques, which include humiliation, sleep deprivation and water boarding, were misrepresenting their efficacy to the highest office.
The report runs to thousands of pages, which first the CIA want buried, then redacted until it is nonsense and finally reduced. Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein, played by Bening, makes sure that it is presented and published.
Daniel Jones, played by Adam Driver has spent five or six obsessed years with his team compiling the report and laying out the conclusions, at risk of prison for up to twenty years, without the Senator’s backing he would have been hung out to dry.
Scott Z Burne, who is producing the next Bond film, has given us a film of intensity and suspense, in the same genre as All the Presidents Men. The film will be in cinemas in November, go see it.
You will hardly have seen anything like this even if you binge on cold case TV dramas ad nauseam. Cold Case Hammarskjöld is all together a different order of exposition.
Why now? Since the air crash that killed Dag Hammarskjöld was in 1961. What could anyone possibly find out that had not already been exhaustively examined? But the odd thing is that although DH was the Secretary General of the United Nations, the investigation into his sudden and shocking death was somewhat muted, brief and swiftly closed. Air accident, pilot error.
But Mads Brügger and Göran Björkdahl were not put off by the time lapse, and by persistent searching through archives and chasing up the few names that they could get hold of, with surprising results they have pieced together a more or less coherent narrative. From contemporary photographs they locate the place where the plane and surrounding debris has been buried, only to be stopped from digging. So then they pursue the human angle, seeking out local witnesses: charcoal burners who were first on the scene, amazingly to us now, these people were not asked for statements, though even fifty years later their recollections are very clear, and confirm each other’s memory without conferring.
The format of the film is puzzling at first, since Mads Brügger tells the story through two typists, who interrogate him every now and then. There are also long interviews with various parties, at least two of whom are proved definitely to have been lying.
What these two men bravely uncovered is momentously important in the investigation into what happened to Dag Hammarskjöld, but in the meantime they also uncovered a shocking conspiracy quite on a par with any genocide you care to think of.
Sudden deaths and brutal murders of anyone who stepped out of line were ruthlessly carried out, and other even more heinous acts of violence and inhumane treatment were exposed.
Finally, presented with all this evidence the UN has begun a belated investigation. Not surprisingly, Britain and South Africa have proved reluctant to co-operate.
If you can get to see this astonishing documentary you should go.
Ridge was as different as it was possible to be. Billed as a poetic delight, it was more a cross between “Our Daily Bread” a documentary shown at an earlier film festival and the history of farm machinery and how noisy it can be.
That is mildly unfair, there were some beautiful scenes, but often when it looked beautiful, rural and bucolic the thunderous music put paid to any contemplation of the idyll: acres of barley swaying in the early morning sun was accompanied by a deafening sound track of drumming. There was a lot of rain which was refreshingly unaccompanied by anything but its own sounds, there were lots of cows, pigs and people and lots and lots of exceptionally noisy machines.
Two cows had gone missing on the ridge, but right at the end there they were in the woods munching happily on greenery…
This non-linear evocation of rural life was not quite what I expected. Skåne is Henning Mankell country, so it was unexpectedly calm, not a dead body in sight
