Hamnet - my first proper film of the festival this year, on a Monday morning, so not particularly auspicious. But we had seen a production of Hamlet on the preceeding Friday, so were nicely primed. Hamlet is hands down my favourite play ever, and I really loved Maggie O'Farrell's novel on which the film is based, directed by Chloe Zhao of Nomadland fame. The story imagines how the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet led to the creation of the play Hamlet. That sounds simple, but along the way it muses over the way that life and art are wrapped together, one feeding the other in a continuous loop. The novel tells the story largely through the interior lives of the characters, and so I wasn't at all sure how that would be managed. It was managed by ditching that altogether and having fantastic actors to bring that to us without words, Jessie Buckley is absolutely the centre of the film , but Paul Mescal brings his fullest and best game to this too.
The first half of the film shows the love between Agnes (Jesse Buckley) and Will Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) one wild and of the woods, and the other bookish latin teacher but they have a connection which they pursue despite the objections of their families. As Will tries to develop his career as a writer, we see the family growing too. There's a lovely scene with the children playing the three witches from Macbeth giving an early sense of how integrated art and life were for Shakespeare. I would have liked more of Hamnet himself, but we do get to see him and his twin sister together and develop a sense of their closeness. At almost the centre of the film we get the death of Hamnet, and the second half is steeped with the grief that they are all stuck within. This is where the film (as well as the book) starts to show the power of art and how something specific can become universal and then back again. The first half has some laughter in it, the second half none, and the last 10 minutes of so had quiet sniffles all around me (I wasn't immune). It's clever in showing us how great art can breathe and change, for example with two different renditions of the 'to be or not to be' speech, both very different but both valid (tbh the Mescal version is the nearest to clunky that the film gets, but I like having the two versions to compare, meaning something different each time). I loved Shakespeare giving us his own angry and self recriminating version of the 'get thee to a nunnery speech', which brings a whole different meaning. The final 10 minutes as we get a version of Hamlet, with Shakespeare playing Hamlet's father, becomes a way to say 'Adieu' to Hamnet.
- Julia Roberts plays a philosophy professor caught up in an abuse scandal at her college. Ayo Adebiri is excellent as a student who makes an accusation about another academic played by Andrew Garfield. Talky, in a Woody Allen sort of way, although without the humour, particularly focusing on the generational cultural divide, and modern sexual politics in the post me too landscape. I enjoyed some of the set pieces between the leads:they are all great actors after all, but it just felt a bit navel gazingy and muddled and I wasn't really sure what the point was by the end.
Frankenstein - a lush gothic tale, with director Guillermo Del Toro giving us a new version of this classic. Looks gorgeous, rich colours, intricate sets and loved the look of the inventor's lair. Jacob Elordi made a pretty creature, and Oscar xIsaac a passionate and driven Baron Frankenstein. I haven't read the book for years, and so spent a bit of time trying to work out what is canon from the text and what has been overlaid by the many iterations of this over the years. This gives us first Frankenstein's story and then the Creature, which sort of worked, although I think it leant slightly more towards the Baron's story. which is all in reds and golds, vs the Creature's story which is largely white and shades of grey. Whilst this version gives us the standard 'who is the monster' and 'what is it that makes us human' themes, this one sort of gives it a softer ending. On more than one occasion I was reminded by Poor Things' which takes a similar story but takes it in a very different direction. This may not be as original as that, but is a very entertaining and well done few hours.
The Mastermind - this has Josh O'Connor in his shaggy and sketchy persona as James, the 'Mastermind', a variation of his Arthur character in
La Chimera. This is a heist gone wrong movie, but understated, with no exciting car chases, or music that to rev up the tension, instead using a plinky jazz soundtrack which keeps it all small and domestic as each step fails to work as it should, including the challenges presented by childcare, and parking problems to name just a couple. It never turns into a proper farce as the mistakes pile up, we just watch the air slowly sink out of James, as all of his friends and family quietly despair of him. Set in the early 70's, there is great period detail in the background, with the Vietnam war, protests and Nixon's presidency quietly humming away whilst the underdeveloped, badly planned and disastrously executed scheme from this clearly non-Mastermind falls apart. Really enjoyed the bathos of the final scene upon reflection, although at the time I felt a bit deflated by it..
Interlude...
One Battle After Another - I had a day off from the London Film Festival and ended up going to see this at my local cinema. An excellent Paul Thomas Anderson film pretending to be ramshackle but actually very tightly made. Leonardo DiCaprio's 'Bob' used to be part of a revolutionary group, but retired and took his daughter to hide away while she grew up and he rotted his brain with drink and drugs. Pitted against them are the reactionary forces of America, secretive but powerful, and who never really go away, epitomised by Sean Penn playing Col Steven Lockjaw as a caricature, but a scary one. There are explosions and an absolutely fantastic swoopy car chase at the end. References to the US treatment of migrants, race and women are all there in the background and also driving the story to a large extent - the bulk of the film is set in Trump's America without any specific reference to it. There's also lots of psychology to unpick here too but it is mainly tremendous fun - there's not a dull moment. DiCaprio flapping around in his dressing gown unable to remember a password and trying to find somewhere to charge his phone while there is a massive raid going on around him will never not be funny, despite the grimness of the surrounding plot. Honestly, this is highly recommended.
Back to the festival....
Blue Moon - directed by Richard Linklater, one of two films Linklater has at this festival focusing on the creatives who make the stuff we love. In this first one, Ethan Hawke plays Lorenz Hart, who had been part of the successful musicals duo Rodgers and Hart until Rodgers got fed up with Harts unreliability and drunkenness. The film covers one evening on the opening night of Oklahoma! when Rodgers finds success with his new writing partner Hammerstein. Hart retreats to a bar, the same bar that Rodgers and Hammerstein will be holding their afterparty, and lays out his woes to the barman and the few other people in the empty bar. He is furious at what he sees as the dumbing down of the art of the musical as well as his own exclusion from the in crowd. But he hasn't given up hope for his professional life, love, or his ability to pull a crowd, planning a large afterparty at his place later that evening. The film is about all sorts of things but there’s a lot about what do you do when others don’t want you. There are plenty of in jokes about movies and musicals, for example, the gay coding of Casablanca, as we find that Hart might just have ‘the start of a beautiful friendship’ with the barman, unfortunately for Hart, an alcoholic who died not long after that was probably too true. It’s very densely written, and heavily talk laden, and I think a little too static for a film - it would make a great play though! But great performances from Hawke, and Andrew Scott as Rodgers, and I loved the little gems of dialogue scattered throughout, including giving E.B.White the idea for Stuart Little.
Nouvelle Vague - Richard Linklater’s homage to French new wave cinema (and his second in this festival), recreating the filming of Jean-Luc Godard’s first film Breathless which was written by Francois Truffaut. Shot in black and white, and, as we heard in the interview with Linklater after the film, using archive information, and even the actual camera used in the original shoot. This is fond and funny and has no sharp edges - a nice way for cinema geeks to spend an afternoon
The History of Sound - Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal in anything has me seated so I had been looking forward to this. A romance set in America in the first bit of the 21st century. Mescal plays a young man born into a poor rural farming life, whilst O’Connor plays David, a much more well to do young man with no family but independent income. They meet and bond over their love of folk music and a fair chunk of the film focuses on the weeks they spend travelling together collecting songs for an archive. The film looks gorgeous and the soundtrack works well although I would have liked a few more cheerful folk songs along with the ballads about lost love. The performances are as good as you would expect from this pairing - both actors had moments that stood out for me, and I think their chemistry works well although I would have liked more of David’s story - particularly I missed seeing more of O'Connor dealing with his character's demons. This is based on a short story which I think was stretched too thin, with pacing a bit too slow in places. There aren’t many laughs in this, and it’s steeped full of yearning, perhaps to an overwhelming degree - a bit more joy wouldn't have gone amiss! Not perfect but worth a look .
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