Tag: Britain

The Score

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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You could bring a legal case against The Score for misrepresentation. It came billed to me as a “heist-musical”. I was deeply intrigued, having never watched a film combine such genres before. Sadly, it is neither a heist film — taking place after some unspecified ‘score’ — or much of a musical either — people standing in rooms while singing instead of providing the pleasures that such a genre usually dictates. Essentially, a play-set-to-film that features a few songs, it keeps the audience in a constant state of anticipation while delivering little to no payoff. Set in a cafe for most of its runtime, it’s like being promised a gourmet steak but the food arrives late and straight out of the microwave.

Mike (Johnny Flynn) and Troy (Will Poulter) have just stolen £20,000. One of their key dealers isn’t with them, so they have to wait at a secluded café for the drop. Like Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1991), it’s all about how they act while waiting for the final resolution as opposed to the nuts and bolts of the so-called heist. The dynamic is tested when Troy falls for pretty café worker Gloria (Naomi Ackie), threatening their need for a low profile. The remaining 90 or so minutes combines a love story, crime “suspense” and several musical interludes.

Musical music need not carry the plot forward, although it can help to integrate music and story together. It doesn’t necessarily need to be catchy either, as long as it is sung with passion and heart. The songs here, written by Flynn, are created in his usual faux country-mode, using monosyllabic utterances in place of words, layered guitar lines and encompassing themes of love and striving to be free. Shot more akin to Les Misérables (Tom Hooper, 2012) than La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016), songs are caught in close-up rather than in a traditional one-shots. Dancing and movement is minimal.

Charisma is sorely lacking, both in the underproduced music and in the undercooked performances. Johnny Flynn seems like a lovely person, but when in the wrong hands, he has a rather underwhelming screen presence. His semi-sardonic personality and self-deprecation, sometimes at odds with his rugged good looks, can be a strength in a film like Emma (2020) — one of the few Jane Austen adaptations that truly bounces off the page — but he is handled poorly here, the viewer unable to determine the arc or heart of his character. Will Poulter suffers similar issues — he can be intense and brooding in anything from the Maze Runner series to Black Runner: Bandersnatch (Charlie Brooker, 2018), but let loose and his energy quickly sputters. Together, the two actors occasionally hit sparks — especially when Flynn is allowed to constantly criticise Poulter’s compulsive actions and when Poulter strikes back — but most of the time they feel mismatched, both indulging their worst acting impulses.

There’s a solid, non-musical short film in all this. But there’s a reason the bus scene in Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936) didn’t last 100 minutes. There’s only so much suspense that the audience can care for. After my initial disappointment regarding the misrepresented premise, The Score quickly exhausted my patience.

The Score plays in the First Feature Competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12th – 28th November.

Getting Away With Murder(s)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

There’s something about the enormity of the issues involved here that makes this a very tough watch. (If it wasn’t, there would be something wrong. The Holocaust is not an easy issue to deal with. Films about it can consequently be tough to watch. And so they should be.) That combined with the near three-hour running time (this is not a complaint, honest) means it sat on my pending review pile for quite a while before I finally sat down and watched it.

I suspect Wilkinson is aware of this problem. As the film starts, he takes you (as it were) gently by the hand as he walks into Auschwitz and matter-of-factly discusses its horrors, helped by a man who works in the museum there and has probably helped numerous people before and since to come to terms with the implications of the place as they go round it. Insofar as one ever can.

We learn of the arrivals off the incoming cattle trucks who were told to go down the ten-minute walk to the showers to get themselves cleaned up. They would take off their clothes and fold them neatly so they could pick them up again afterwards. They were herded into the shower interiors, quite densely packed. And they never came out because these weren’t showers at all, but gas chambers used for the systematic elimination of many of the new arrivals. It’s sickening just to think about.

The people who herded them in were inmates themselves. If you were told you could do that job or join them in the gas chambers yourself, what would you do? [A quick aside: the extraordinary and brilliant subjective camera drama Son Of Saul (László Nemes, 2015) goes a long way to understanding an inmate who does this job. Not that that’s possible.] As I say, trying to comprehend the inhumanity of this is really, really hard. These inmate-workers would be told, “the only way out of here is through the chimney.”

The screen shows well-put together maps of the place and gruelling archive footage is presented throughout the film in a non-confrontational, non-sensationalised way which helps. However, this material is, on the most fundamental human level, horrible. There’s a part of you that just wants to get away from the screen and throw up. People shouldn’t treat each other like this. Yet history testifies that they do, and we should never forget the fact. It’s the reason we need films like this, and the reason you need to watch it. Lest we forget, as they say.

Which implies that we know it all already. For myself, though, there is much in this film I didn’t know. Ranging from specific details about perpetrators large and small in the overall process that was the Holocaust right the way through to the scale of the operation (six million Jews turns out both an oversimplification and an understatement) and all the complicated ins and outs of the legal aftermath of the attempts both to track down and administer justice to the numerous perpetrators alongside the numerous attempts of all those involved to evade justice, all to often successfully. Much of what’s shown here is an indictment of humanity, although all the way through there are signs of hope as perpetrators are convicted and justice done. But it seems that too many get (got) off scot free or with woefully inadequate punishment for their appalling crimes. It’s not surprising that someone should want to make a film to address the burning question about the injustice of all this. Kudos to Wilkinson for doing so.

It may make for harrowing and deeply upsetting viewing, but at the same time, it’s consistently compelling. And it absolutely screams out to be seen.

After Auschwitz we move on to France, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Austria and, eventually, Germany. In his own county of Yorkshire which has a population of 5.4 million, Wilkinson attempts to get his head round the sheer enormity of the figures. For comparison, both Denmark and the US State of Maryland have populations of six million. If all those in Yorkshire were killed, he asks, would the UK government remain silent?

York, where the film has its premiere, is the site of England’s largest massacre of Jews in 1190, when some 150 were killed. Lest we think such things could never happen here.

Wilkinson also travels to Galway, Ireland to see the grave of William Joyce who broadcast German propaganda during the war as Lord Hawhaw. He was captured, tried and, in 1946, executed. His case is comparatively cut and dried compared to what happened to those Germans who abetted the Holocaust.

After Germany’s defeat in 1945 and the shock of what they found in the death camps, the Allies vowed to bring the Holocaust’s perpetrators to justice. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg is often cited, but in fact that was held in a building with the capacity to house no more than 24 defendants of whom three never made it to trial and only 12 received the death sentence.

Matters were scarcely helped by the Nazis’ use of law under the Third Reich. Prior to that, law in most European countries had been based on the foundation of the Ten Commandments, but the regime effectively suspended such considerations, creating a legal framework under which it was permissible to eliminate specific ethnic and other minorities. The concept of ‘crimes against humanity’ didn’t exist until its instigation for the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, 1945-6.

Other trials followed, but the Allies failed to keep up the momentum as they became more concerned with the growing threat of the Soviets and the rise of the Cold War than with hunting down Nazi war criminals when Germany was economically on its knees. Finishing the job within Germany’s borders was left largely to Germany itself.

Where East Germany, as a newly formed Communist state, rebuilt its judiciary from scratch with entirely new appointments, West Germany retained many judges who had been in post during the Nazi era, many of whom were somewhat sympathetic to the murderers in the dock. In a very real sense, the post-war, West German judiciary had became Nazified.

Thus, in later West German trials, while some of the murderers received the full force of the law in the death penalty, many sentences were much more lenient or subsequently commuted so that, for example, a 20 year sentence became five years. There are also examples of murderers living in Germany who were never prosecuted, or who got off during a trial using the most spurious of defences. In many cases, these were people living under their real names.

Others fled, most infamously to South America, but to other countries as well, including the UK. In recent years, in his retirement, Nazi hunter Dr. Stephen Ankier researched their whereabouts, often to find the perpetrators he unearthed die of illness or old age before they could be brought to trial. The UK’s record on finding and prosecuting the perpetrators has been poor.

Getting Away With Murder(s) had its premiere on Thursday 9th November in at the Everyman Cinema, York. Dates for further screenings around the UK are constantly being added: click here to see if your town or city is listed yet. If it isn’t, then tell your local cinema you want to see it.

The film is released in cinemas in the UK on Friday, October 1st, the 75th anniversary of the end of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

Review originally published on Jeremy C. Processing. Reprinted by permission.

1917

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

When the trailer for 1917 debuted, it bore a similar aesthetic to Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017) – not an entirely bad thing, but not the preferred style, either. I had shared the minority view that Nolan’s film was, in the words of The Guardian’s David Cox, ‘bloodless, boring and empty’. The menace and spectacle of its opening quarter petered out into litany of tepid peril overcast by Hoyte van Hoytema’s gloomy cinematography.

Thankfully, 1917 makes a quick break from these facile similarities with its tight pace, raw emotion and staggering camerawork. It is one of those rare films where, as a reviewer, you risk getting stuck in a rabbit hole of superlatives – so here goes it.

Firstly, the performances, though good, are not what drive this film. It is instead an intensely sensory experience that demands to be seen on the biggest and best system. Roger Deakins’s masterful camerawork bobs and weaves through the trenches of the Western Front in seemingly one unbroken take, capturing the men of the British Expeditionary Force with a visceral fluidity. After ten years of excellent cinema, 1917 will be counted amongst the decade’s most impressive and absorbing.

Everyone in this film is under overwhelming pressure – few more acutely than Lance Corporals Blake (Dean Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay). The young men are ordered to carry a message across enemy territory that will prevent a British battalion of 1,600 men, which includes Blake’s brother, from charging into a death trap.

Chapman and MacKay both give strong performances. Blake is a chipper lad given to jocular anecdotes and crude jokes, while Schofield, apparently the more experienced of the two, has developed a war-weary reserve. There’s a mutual respect and affection for each other, though, and their extraordinary experiences only makes their bond stronger.

This tight, simple premise and character dynamic sets the stage for one of the most remarkable portrayals of combat in recent memory. It may not have the thematic depth of Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957), but Mendes conveys the all-consuming stress, misery and exhaustion of total war. Many of the men Blake and Schofield meet are in varying depths of hate and prostration, but most are driven by a stoic resolve to keep moving forward, whatever their dismal fate may be.

Key to the film’s immersion is Dennis Gassner’s epic set design. We follow the troops as they traverse yard after yard of dank trenches, and the scope becomes even more grimly arresting when they scale the parapet, entering a vast, ghoulish wasteland of sodden craters, splintered trees and mangled bodies. Indeed, there are moments across No Man’s Land that resemble the body horror of David Cronenberg; the attention paid to the grisly details of death and decay is disturbing as it is appropriate.

Inspired by the stories of his grandfather, director Sam Mendes and DOP Roger Deakins have made the biggest and best First World War film of the 21st century. This is important, because for better or worse, cinema has the power to reinvigorate history, to spread knowledge and awareness. After all, the First World War has been overshadowed by the conflict that followed, with its clearer moral compass and even greater level of destruction. Mendes’s film, while not a depiction of the war’s terrible stalemate, will nonetheless assault one’s senses and give them some idea of what their forebears endured in Britain’s deadliest war.

1917 is in theatres Friday, December 10. On VoD on Monday, June 1st. On Netflix on Friday, September 10th (2021)

The Keeper (Trautmann)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Set in WW2 and its aftermath in Britain, this looks at first sight like a football movie. However, it becomes something else altogether by taking a long hard look at the plight of a person living in another country that’s heavily prejudiced against his own. Sadly one doesn’t have to look very far in present day, hostile environment Britain to see that such attitudes are currently very real and out in the open. This means that although this ostensibly covers real life events from over half a century ago, certain elements will likely resonate with contemporary UK audiences well beyond football fans.

German infantryman Bert Trautmann (David Kross) is captured by the British in WW2 and sent to a PoW camp just outside Manchester. Despite the presence of a few hardcore Nazis among the prisoners, most including Bert are ordinary Germans caught up in the conflict. Nevertheless, the English sergeant who runs the camp would have all of them shot were the decision his and makes their lives as difficult as possible.

However Bert has something specific in his favour: for as long as he can remember, he’s loved playing football. A chance sighting of his goalkeeping skills by visiting shopkeeper and amateur team manager Jack Friar (John Henshaw) leads to Bert’s helping out at Jack’s shop although in reality he’s there to be the local team’s new goalie. Despite anti-German prejudice from Bert, his daughter Margaret (Freya Mavor) and members of the football team, Bert’s determination to make things work off the field and his footballing skills themselves lead not only to his eventual signing by Manchester City but also to romance, marriage and family life with Margaret.

The widespread hatred of the Germans by the English during and after the War here serves as the backdrop to Bert’s relationships with others. On an individual level, he always has to start by winning people over before they can accept him. Jack is motivated by the fact of his team’s current goalie not being very good rather than any altruistic desire to help an enemy alien find acceptance in England’s green and pleasant land. Margaret likewise dislikes Bert and his fellow countrymen for what they’ve inflicted on her country and countrymen, but being confronted with a real life, breathing human being forces her to re-examine the ideas that everyone around her unquestioningly accepts.

Such tensions are equally evident on a wider social level. Jack first presents Bert to the team as someone who can’t speak with a scarf round his throat, correctly guessing not only that the other players won’t take kindly to the German’s national identity as soon as he opens his mouth and speaks with an accent but also that they’ll be rapidly won over if they see him in action in goal. And when Bert turns professional his Man City career is dogged for some while by that city’s Jewish community leaders’ understandable misgivings regarding his presence.

Overall, the film has much to say about how peace, forgiveness and reconciliation can broker a path through seemingly intractable and divisive prejudices to a much better place. It also delves into Bert’s internal torment as to whether he could have done more to change the outcome of an incident in his past when a superior German officer stole a football from a Jewish boy, teased him and then shot him dead. This memory periodically surfaces in Bert’s head until, in the final reel, events take an unexpected turn to put Bert and Margaret’s marriage under severe stress.

Working through these difficult and sometimes painful issues is underscored at the end as crowds of fans sing Abide With Me, a Christian hymn that’s been wrested away from its church roots and come to represent a deep spiritual truth about British people gathering together to watch, support and enjoy football. This in turn comes to stand for an acceptance of those who are different within wider British society. A helpful parable indeed for the UK’s present, troubled times.

The Keeper is out in the UK on Friday, April 5th. Watch the film trailer below:

Hurricane

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

It’s too easy to take most British WW2 movies (e.g. Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan, 2017) and claim they bolster the idea of Brexit – Britain alone against the world, defeating the dastardly Germans and so on. Hurricane is different. Its Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots are refugees from the Polish Air Force, wiped out by the Luftwaffe in a mere three days and kept on ice by Britain’s xenophobic War Office following their arrival in England. When they’re finally allowed into the air, these Poles turn out to be much better fighter pilots than the majority of Brits who are being slaughtered by the enemy at an alarming rate. Indeed, it’s the Polish pilots that turn the Battle of Britain around.

Hurricane is named after the RAF’s most widely used fighter aircraft and those portrayed here, at least when flying, are computer generated. Much of the CG work has been carried out in India (nothing wrong with that) on the cheap. The aircraft looks like computer models partly because no-one’s bothered to dirty them up and partly because there’s no attempt at reflecting the weather on their metal surfaces as real flying aircraft surfaces would do. Consequently, the flying sequences have an air of unreality about them which a little more budgetary spending in the right places could easily have fixed.

Other elements more than compensate for the cost-cutting CG, however. The dogfight sequences are well put together and grippingly paced. The main characters are efficiently written and the film covers a lot of historical ground. The pilots speak Polish with subtitles when they’re alone together while the Brits speak English. There’s more than enough aerial combat to satisfy audiences, yet the scenes on the ground prove equally compelling – interaction between cocky Polish pilots who know they’re up to the job and members of the British command convinced the bloody foreigners are not, Poles fraternising with the native women and scenes in the air command bunker with personnel moving tokens representing groups of aircraft round a large table.

Welshman Iwan Rheon (from Game Of Thrones) else makes a fairly convincing Polish lead, but the surprise outstanding performance comes from decidedly carnal, command bunker girl Stefanie Martini who spends much of her free time pursuing pilots including the Poles. “A few years ago, I’d have been called a tart, but today I’m just a good sport.” she says enthusiastically.

If the film doesn’t make a big thing of British racism, it’s present nonetheless. Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) celebrations are overshadowed by the British government’s swift moves to send the Poles back home following a survey claiming 56% of Brits wanted this. That’s set against other, less racist images when Jan (Rheon) is helped down from dangling by his parachute from a street lamp by an old couple who invite him into their home, discuss their own son’s death in the conflict then feed the airman a thick and tasty sandwich. If the British establishment doesn’t like Poles much, the ordinary Brits pictured here get on perfectly well with them.

That’s a far cry from some of the anti-foreigner sentiment and the ascendancy of the far-right seen in this country since the Referendum. The suggestion here that immigrants to Britain can make a valuable contribution is refreshing indeed in the current political climate.

Hurricane is out in the UK on Friday, September 7th. Watch the film trailer below:

The Cured

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Senan (Sam Keeley) is haunted by his past. Blood. Eating human flesh. He had no control after Conor (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) bit him. Senan killed his brother. Now, years after the outbreak of the Maze virus across Europe, some 75% of former zombies have been returned to human consciousness but retain the memory of anti-social actions they could not control. Senan is one of their number, the cured. That leaves another 25% locked away in institutions. While the 25% sense that the 75% are like them and don’t attack them, they still pose a threat to everyone else who was never infected.

Senan has been reassigned to live with his bereaved sister-in-law Abbie (a terrific Ellen Page) who has agreed to take him in while he readjusts to society. He’s lucky: as the army’s Captain Cantor (Stuart Graham) tells him, not everyone’s family will have them back after what occurred. Just ask Conor: his father blames him for the death of his mother. Ireland is divided over the situation. The government talks of humane extermination for the 25%. Signs of a C with a diagonal slash though it have become the symbol to express anger towards the cured and there are ugly scenes and fighting on the streets.

Filmed amidst the familiar bricks and mortar of the streets of Northern Ireland, this is the zombie movie recast as a brutal essay on difference: us and them. People divided by forces not of their own making. Abbie just wants to raise her small son Cillian and feels tension between herself and the anti-cured world, between herself and Senan who may know exactly how her husband died, and between herself and Conor who she doesn’t trust but who feels an attraction towards her.

The cured are required to take low social position jobs as part of their reintegration and Senan finds himself assigned as assistant to the kindly Dr Lyons (Paula Malcomson) who is engaged on the treatment of virus sufferer Jo (Hilda Fay) for whom she believes a cure can be found.

Conor becomes increasingly angered by the situation and rallies other cured to take action, starting with firebombing houses and ending, towards the finale, with the release of the 25% “because they’re like us”. With Senan becoming increasingly hostile to Conor’s actions, the two are set for a head on collision with Abbie’s son caught in the middle in a heart-stopping climax.

A zombie movie with a difference, this uses the genre to conjure up images of prejudice, sectarianism and the fuelling of hate. Images speak to Northern Ireland’s past: streets where it isn’t safe to walk, people assaulted or abused by army personnel, a masked assailant attacking a man in his family home. The narrative speaks equally to wider situations too – an Ireland divided by a Brexit border, a Britain rebooted as a Hostile Environment, a Europe set against refugees from outside, apartheid, the Holocaust… any situation where fear pits one group against another. That’s really not what you expect from a zombie movie.

Consequently, one wonders exactly what zombie movie fans will make of it. On the flip side, it remains to be seen whether art movie lovers who wouldn’t normally go near something like this can be persuaded to endure the violence and mayhem for the sake of the searing dramatic content. This being a brave attempt at something very different, which comes off, you should make the effort to go and watch it.

The Cured is out in the UK on Friday, May 11th. Watch the film trailer below:

This is rural Britain: lonely and loveless

Posted on by victorfraga

The year of 2017 in British independent cinema saw a shift in perspectives on contemporary life distant from street lights and 24-hour takeaways. Their depictions of country life, God’s Own Country (Francis Lee) and The Levelling (Hope Dickson Leach; pictured above) simply do not just use their stunning vistas as a reflection of a character’s isolation, they interact with a filmic representation of rural life and class that has been prevalent in European cinema for years, specifically in the films of French duo Dardenne brothers and more recently, illustrated poignantly by JR and Agnès Varda’ in Faces Places (also from this year).

Forget Leigh and Loach; this was the year of Lee and Leach. Away from the defining voices of arthouse British film as Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, who have not released any films in 2017, first time feature length directors Hope Dickson Leach and Francis Lee construct tactile debuts that speak to a repressed and reserved sense of Britishness that currently results in suicide being the leading cause of deaths in men aged 20-49. Similarly, their underlying socio-political connotations, their films speak to contemporary Britain in Eastern European migration impact on the Brexit vote and a wide demographic of untraceable Conservative voters who helped keep the Tory’s in power during the 2015 and 2017 General Elections. Their emotionally unstable and insecure male characters speak to a present day society engulfed with a fake sense of nationality. By looking to European filmic influences, Leach and Lee speak to a class and themes deserving of their time in the cinematic spotlight.

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Long and winding country road

After gaining the ‘Star of Tomorrow’ Award by Screen International ten years ago for The Dawn Chorus, Hope Dickson Leach’s arduous task of getting a full feature film made speaks to an industry so consumed with an unwelcomed over assertive masculinity resulting in a gender imbalance worse in 2017 than in 1913, as The Guardian reported in September. Taking a focused look at The Levelling, its lead character is a young independent veterinary student who is faced to return home after she receives a tragic call informing of a family suicide.

The devastation caused by her brother’s death is embodied in a destructive flood, which has damaged the farmland and livestock. Such floods leave their physical devastation in the surrounding landscape, still Leach utilises a stark juxtaposition of animals filmed struggling for dear life behind a void of blackness and water to draw further attention to their damage. Adopting some cinematic panache clearly references Jonathan Glazer’s masterful Under the Skin (2013; pictured above) and Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986; pictured below) , yet underlying this, is an innovative representation on an environmental crisis that left the local farming community in a state of sheer dismay.

Such a minimalistic and surrealist approach is rarely seen in contemporary British film, only serving to highlight Leach’s very creative filmic approach. Through this void of nothingness, the rural community are truly isolated from the rest of society; foreground outside the context of The Levelling in a report documenting the Environment Agency’s neglecting of Somerset rivers. The neglect held at Parliament transpires is filtered in an expression European influences. Reading the void in a psychological light, its blackness emphasises Elle’s brother’s fragility of mind, resulting in his decision to take his own life. The antithesis of the idyllic countryside, soon to be seen in Downtown Abbey’s jump to the big screen, The Levelling’s setting and focus on a lower- middle class awash with a daily struggle evidently displays a Britishness which isn’t not so jolly, secure or pastoral after all.

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British boys don’t cry

The fragility of British masculinity and adoption of European styles comparably permeates God’s Own Country (in the two pictures below). Inviting an aesthetic compassion to Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2001), the cinematography captures the Yorkshire moors in an pure fashion; it evokes every human sense we hold through sight and sound. Chiefly in repressing his sexuality, Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor) forces himself into stealthy sexual acts and drinking his woes away.

Forced to take up his father’s position on the farm after a stroke, life is a constant slow movement in a sea of grey for Johnny. Employed as an additional pair of hands, Romanian worker Gheorghe Ionescu (Alec Secareanu) lives an unstable life of physical labour upon different farms across the county. Forced to work together, in order to preserve the farm, Johnny comes to adore Gheorghe in time through his loving care and attention. Escalated by an understatedly aggressive performance by O’Connor, God’s Own Country’s protagonist typifies the much too prominent reserved sense of British masculinity. In every movement, he appears to be exerting every sinew in his body. Failing to express his emotions freely has been detrimental to his life as whole, granted until Ionescu has entered it. Firstly, against his presence at the farm, clear racist and far-right ideologies are held towards Gheorghe. Johnny’s colloquial racial slurs are accentuated by the geopolitical context of contemporary Britain.

Not an outright Brexiteer, it’s not misinformed to suggest that the lead character could have easily been swayed by Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and et al’s promise of an extra £350 million a week to reinvested into the NHS, something which Farage himself has stated as a regretful pledge. Pre- and post- Brexit hence consume the undertones. Lee’s ultimate message of transforming hate to love is a message that should be embraced by all. Roger Ebert’s Glenn Kenny cites God’s Own Country a “a tricky movie, but not in a way that’s dishonest. Its first feet are in the school of miserablist realism” – thus linking to the verisimilitude of Bruno Dumont and his French contemporaries. Though a simple link in their approach to filmmaking, it cannot be ignored that God’s Own Country’s authenticity of working life, accompanied by a sound design which leaves one feeling cold, is pivotal to illustrating a class familiarly seen abroad and not in UK features.

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British and beautiful

The distinctions between fiction and reality are blurred in the deep focus God’s Own Country and The Levelling pay towards presenting a rural community who speak more to what Britain and Britishness is in 2017 than any UK produced film this year. Yes, they do use European styles and cinematic language, but what is created by Lee and Leach are entirely British and beautiful pieces of film. A sense of duality lingers over any final comment; beautiful creations have been made through illumining a class who hold some of the most prevalent problems in modern society.

Sean Martin’s essay ‘Seven Elements of a Tarkovsky Film’, states that “Tarkovsky is essentially proposing giving the audience time to inhabit the world that the take is showing us, not to watch it, but look at it, to explore it. A film, therefore, is not an escape from life, but a deepening of it”. And this is is precisely what Lee and Leach achieved in their two films, with such a poignant representation of British rural communities.

After God’s Own Country’s success at the BIFA Awards a week ago, taking home best sound (Anna Bertmark), Best Actor (Josh O’Connor), Debut Screenwriter (Francis Lee) and Best Film for 2017, it is welcomed acclaim for a film which deals which our socio-political time and British rural communities in such a nuanced and understated fashion, evidently resonating with BIFA voters.