Tag: WW2

Fairytale (Skazka)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

Adolf Hitler. Benito Mussolini. Winston Churchill. Joseph Stalin. Between them they were responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people, before, during and after WW2. Great men in the traditional sense, casting a wide influence over Europe that persists until this day. If you put them all through a live-action Dall-E generator and had them talk to one another, you might have something approximating Fairytale, the latest film from legendary Russian director Alexander Sokurov.

This hybrid live-action/animated film — somewhere between the compositing tricks of Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) and Zelig (Woody Allen, 1983), the uncanny valley of the deepfake WOMBO app and the foggy mysticism of Hedgehog in the Fog (Yuri Norstein, 1975) — is a strange, philosophical wandering through the minds of the 20th century’s most influential and evil men. Equal parts fascinating and beguiling, frustrating and ponderous, it shows Sokurov is still a director unafraid to innovate while moving into the late period of his career.

It begins with Stalin waking up in a black-and-white nether-zone, next to none other than Jesus Christ himself. God’s own son lies in a somnambulant posture, unable to get up. One suspects he took a look at the world after the Second World War and believed a long lie-down was necessary. Stalin instantly tells him to get up, making a nebulous comparison between Christianity and communism. It’s the first of many one-line statements in a film jam-packed with odd aphorisms. Don’t expect genuine insight, but a sustained mood — a universe that is uncanny and provocative, asking the viewer to bring their own feelings to the world Sokurov creates.

Using archive footage of these dictators and placing them in a composited landscape that feels equal parts William Blake and Hieronymus Bosch, we are treated to a world that moves in endless circles. Dante and the opening lines of the Inferno are invoked — as well as the deep dark wood his protagonist finds himself in — but his Purgatorio feels like the bigger influence here, a world where forward or backward movement seems impossible, characters locked in an endless stasis. These men wait and wait for God to provide judgement, seeing if they finally make it into heaven or hell. They make their case in oblique ways, often talking past each other and wearing different uniforms, realising the kind of odd “what-if” situation you never knew you wanted.

The inclusion of Winston Churchill might be puzzling to certain Brits, due to the fact that he helped win the war and is considered a legend by most in the nation, but when you actually reckon with his vile white supremacism — condemned at the time by members of his own party! — and the legacy of the Bengali famine, his inclusion in the film amongst these tyrants does feel warranted. Either way, his British stoicism and endless pining for the Queen — remarkably still alive — provide a neat and humorous counterpoint to the ramblings of his fascist and communist contemporaries. Interestingly, no Americans feature, Sokurov keeping his perspective fully on the European perspective.

Conceived before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there are echoes of modern times throughout. Boris Johnson failed to capture Churchill’s brio, while Vladimir Putin is bringing back the Stalinist era. There is always a problem when the man becomes a symbol of the nation itself, and pursues more and more depraved imperialist goals in the pursuit of endless power. It’s interesting that the masses themselves never seem to fully come into view, morphing together into shadows and waves and making lots of noise while lacking definition. It shows that dictatorial ambition, regardless of political affiliation, only works by seeing the people as a mass, never as individuals, despite the need for a god-like figurehead at the top. But there is only one God, and he has the power to decide everyone’s ultimate fate.

Rejected by Cannes for misguided political reasons — after all, simply being Russian is not a crime — Fairytale is too bizarre to resonate with viewers around the world, but for those interested in WW2 history and the legacy of great men, as well as films that pursue unique cinematic forms, this is certainly a film worth checking out.

Fairytale plays in the Concorso Internazionale as part of the Locarno Film Festival, running from 3-13th August.

The Natural History of Destruction

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM CANNES!

The Natural History of Destruction asks a simple question: is bombing civilian populations justified in the name of war? It seems to be the only question in the film, asked again and again and again, as Sergei Loznitsa shows us endless images of the mechanics, banality and brutality of war: leaving endless, merciless destruction in its wake in search of a bigger cause. Ostensibly about the allied bombing of Germany — which is estimated to have killed between 350,000 to 635,000 people while crippling the country’s armaments production — the film’s timely premiere resonates in the current moment, with Russia’s campaign of terror demolishing cities in Ukraine as this review is being written.

Created exclusively with archive footage courtesy of both British and German collections, Loznitsa’s latest is a WW2 film that feels contemporaneous, mixing black-and-white observational footage with painstaking re-recordings to show us the total dehumanisation of war.

We start with sketches of everyday German life, people out and about in town, heading to biergartens and cafes, singing songs and going to work. Evening arrives, the picture zooms out and these scenes are reduced to momentary lights in the ground, strikingly light up by the advent of cluster-bombs.

I didn’t just see Rostock, Lübeck, Cologne and Berlin while watching this film. I saw Mariupol, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. Further back, it evokes NATO campaigns in Baghdad and Belgrade, or Putin’s levelling of Grozny, all committed in the name of the “greater good”. No matter who is waging war and who is on the so-called right side of history, the final effects are the same: dead people, flattened buildings, the complete vanquishing of hope and humanity.

Occasionally the silent-film-like images are punctuated by speeches. One British army official asks the German population to simply leave the cities and camp out in the countryside, a simplistic solution that betrays the reality of living in a country during the war. He goes on to say that although a campaign of bombing on this scale has never been tried before, it will make an “interesting experiment.”

And while war historians might agree that the bombing itself was justified in that it ground German production to its knees, allowing Soviet Union and American forces to sweep in and take Berlin, absolutists can claim the moral high ground: no victory could possibly be worth this much death and destruction. But Loznitsa avoids any editorial process — no talking heads, no narration, no moral grandstanding — and allows us to come to our own conclusions; starting debates instead of finishing them.

It’s this complexity, as well as seeking the humanity in a people that overwhelmingly supported the Nazis, that make him a complex figure. Only recently was he kicked out of the Ukrainian film academy for his ties to Russia and for speaking out against a widespread boycott, while at the same time, many of his fiction films have also been accused of Russophobia. In my view, this controversy is probably the sign of an independent filmmaker.

One thing you can say about Loznitsa is that he’s both a deep thinker and a prolific filmmaker (this is his third documentary in two years). Nonetheless, clocking in at just under 110 minutes long, his images are exhaustive and enervating, at once deeply terrifying and rather monotonous. His documentaries, like Victory Day, which stretched to over an hour despite only having enough material to justify a 20-minute short, has the habit of just making the same point over and over again. While the intention is to conclusively batter home the horrors of aerial warfare, the length and duration of certain images, which repeat themselves without revealing any new layers, struck me as unnecessary. The deeply-felt moral question the film raises is a highly important one, making it even more disappointing the finished product makes this such an alienating picture to sit through.

The Natural History of Destruction plays in the Official Selection as a Special Screening at Cannes. No UK release date yet.

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.

The Painted Bird

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

The title of this film – and the novel it’s based on – refers to a moment in which a peasant catches a bird, covers it with paint and releases it to the flock circling above. When the bird rejoins them, its altered appearance causes the group to swipe it to death. Meanwhile, the peasant observes with a gruff chuckle, amused by his casual sadism. This is the grim metaphor of The Painted Bird, a Holocaust film that meditates on prejudice, cruelty and just about every negative human instinct one can think of.

The story, allegedly autobiographical, follows a young boy leading a nomadic existence in a slew of Eastern European backwaters during the Second World War. Separated from his parents, he meanders from village to village, hissed at and beaten by almost everyone he encounters. Whether he’s cursed as a gypsy, a Jew or even a vampire – the boy is always a painted bird.

For Czech filmmaker Vaclav Marhoul, this relentlessly harsh story has been an 11-year passion project, and this shows in the quality of his grueling three-hour adaptation, which he wrote, directed and produced. It is a work of genuine auteurship that brushes shoulders with the likes of Ivan’s Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962) and Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985).

What is most impressive about Marhoul’s film is how it captures the novel’s pace and brooding tone. The reticent first-person narrative has been adapted into a film of visuals and diegetic sound rather than dialogue, absorbing you with Vladimir Smutny’s stark, monochromatic camerawork. Indeed, it is quite uncanny how Marhoul presents Kosinski’s imagery just as you imagined it, capturing the sense of wilderness and base instinct that makes the novel so engrossing.

The narrative is chaptered according to whose guardianship the boy falls into: Marta, Olga, Miller, Lekh & Ludmila, et al. He experiences some mercy with these people, but it proves fleeting as wicked ulterior motives emerge. After all, he is traversing a war-ravaged landscape with little centralised authority, where the mob rules and order is maintained with arbitrary beatings.

Naturally, this violence begets violence, and there are shades of Bad Boy Bubby (Rolph de Heer, 1992) in how the young boy vents his anger. He is bottom of the totem pole wherever he goes, but with animals – namely a goat – he can exact savage revenge against his miserable existence. Soon, the boy graduates to humans, following the only moral instruction he is given during this hellish odyssey, “Remember… an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” This commentary on the cyclical nature of violence is one of the most interesting features of Marhaul’s film and Kosinski’s book. It is the most twisted coming of age tale imaginable, depicting how abusers have often themselves been abused. After the litany of sadism and death the boy endures, it doesn’t bear thinking about what sort of man he will become.

It’s been 55 years since Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird was published in the United States. Kosinski would go on to befriend Peter Sellers, write the screenplay for Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979) and give a memorable supporting turn in Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981). But it is only now, thanks to Vaclav Marhaul’s dogged passion, that the late writer’s Goldingesque morality tale has been realised on the big screen.

The Painted Bird is out in cinemas on Friday, September 11th.

A Hidden Life

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Opening with and periodically punctuated by documentary footage of Hitler and the Third Reich, this is Malick’s retelling of the wartime life experience of a real life couple. Deeply in love, Franz and Fani Jägerstätter (August Diehl and Valerie Pachner) run their farm near a remote, mountainous Austrian country village. With the Third Reich on the ascendant, he gets called up for military service and is billeted in a nearby castle and trained while she, the kids (three girls) and her sister Resie (Maria Simon) struggle to manage the farm without him.

When France surrenders, many men are released from national service and Franz is allowed to go back to farm, wife and family. However it’s only a matter of time before he’s called up again. And this time, the only way out of signing the oath is to go to prison.

Other hands might have turned the real life history on which this is based into a pedestrian movie that wouldn’t do any favours to the memory of those involved. Malick, however, uses the couple’s written correspondence when the husband is away as the spine of his narrative so that when he hangs his images and sounds upon it, they add something to a solid story that already makes sense in its own right.

So he starts off with fields and mountains and a couple very much in love, intermittently throwing in images of family life and agriculture before showing us life in army barracks then prison. Although the whole runs the best part of three hours, it never feels like it, more like a very slow paced, leisurely 90 minutes in which time sometimes seems to stand still and the film’s content slowly seeps into the viewer.

That content is, to express it at its simplest, what are you supposed to do in society when bad people are in charge? Franz wrestles with the Christian injunction to be subject to the governing authorities but at the same time to resist evil. First friends then acquaintances and finally judges tell him how much simpler his life would be if he only signed the oath to Hitler. His devastating response is that, if he doesn’t sign, he is free. A challenge to us all, especially if we find our society asking us to comply with ideas or actions which run counter to our conscience.

In retelling this story on the screen in the way that he has, Malick brilliantly expresses the numinous good and the fact that some ideas or values are so important that everything else must take second place to them, even if it means going against what most people think. This is a profoundly moving experience on a very deep spiritual level, rare in cinema. It’ll be a long time before we see another film with the same theological depth that speaks so eloquently to the problem of human suffering as this one does.

A Hidden Life is out in the UK on Friday, January 17th. Watch the film trailer below:

Never Look Away (Werk Ohne Autor)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

What is art? Why do artists make art? These questions lie behind Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s latest film, like his earlier The Lives Of Others (2006) a German story exploring that country’s history and identity. It clocks in at over three hours, but don’t let that put you off because it needs that time to cover the considerable ground it does. Never Look Away spans the bombing of Dresden by the Allies in WW2, the liquidation of people considered by the Nazis inferior and therefore unfit to live and the very different worlds of post-war art schools in first East and later West Germany. This means it also spans two generations: those who were adults during the war, and those who were children at that time and became adults in post-war Germany.

Six year old Kurt Barnert (Cai Cohrs) wants to be an artist. He is taken to Dresden by his Aunt Elizabeth (Saskia Rosenthal from Lore, Cate Shortland, 2012) to see an exhibition of Degenerate Art mounted by the Nazis. He is fascinated. She tells him she rather likes the works displayed, but warns him not to tell anyone else. Later, he finds her playing the piano nude. She extols the mysteries of art to be found in life and exhorts him to “never look away”. She’s both creatively gifted and mentally ill. Being taken away in an ambulance to be incarcerated in a hospital she again issues that same exhortation. She will never leave the hospital system, thanks to Nazi doctors who have the power of life or death over their patients.

During the war, one night Kurt watches tin foil dropped by bombers around his home “to jam radio communication” before they drop bombs on Dresden in the distance, razing it to the ground.

After the war, Kurt – now a young man (Tom Schilling) – works painting signs until his boss, impressed by Kurt’s artistic skill, has him apply to Dresden art school where he falls in love with Ellie Seeband (Paula Beer) whose gynaecologist father (Sebastian Koch from The Lives Of Others) regards him as inferior stock and tries to destroy the couple’s relationship. After a promising career as a Socialist Realist painter of murals, Kurt with Ellie in tow defects from East to West Berlin a couple of months before the Berlin Wall is built. Kurt becomes a student at that hotbed of modern art Düsseldorf Kunstakademie and later a famous artist.

It’s a lot more complicated than that, but it’s difficult to give away much more without spoilers. The whole is based on the life of internationally renowned artist Gerhard Richter, who has read the script by the writer-director and made one or two suggestions which were incorporated. However, Richter has subsequently disowned the film (despite not having viewed it). Kurt’s tutor at the Kunstakademie is based on equally celebrated artist Joseph Beuys. Von Donnersmarck describes the piece as a work of fiction, although a great deal of the material appears to be historically accurate with names changed.


This is masterful storytelling with top-notch performances. More importantly, it seems to pick at the soul of a nation (Germany). There’s a lot of very nasty material festering beneath the surface and as you watch certain elements really start to get to you. Having watched it twice, this writer can attest to its being even more powerful on a second viewing: lots of little details elude you first time round as you grapple with the shocking overall story only to make themselves known second time around as you have a chance to take in the detail.

Never Look Away garnered two well deserved Oscar nominations earlier this year, for Best Foreign Film and Best Cinematography (it was shot by Caleb Deschanel whose impressive credits include The Black Stallion, Carroll Ballard, 1979). Alongside The Lives Of Others, which dealt with the Stasi (the East German secret police), it feels as if von Donnersmarck is building a panorama of German history through a series of historically grounded narratives of which this is only the second.

Finally, the German title Werk Ohne Autor translates literally as Work Without Author in reference to the artist’s claim that the photographs which form the basis of paintings “are just photographs”. This film suggests there’s a lot more to these apparently random images than that. Possibly the most effective slice of narrative storytelling we’ll see in the cinema this year. Supremely powerful, dirtylicious stuff.

Never Look Away is out in the UK on Friday, July 5th. On VoD on Monday, October 28th.

Never Look Away is in our list of Top 10 dirtiest films of 2019.

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:

The 12th Man

Posted on by victorfraga

Despite the blockbusters of today often climaxing with fictional wars, the war genre itself is perhaps out of favour. Perhaps in our mollycoddling superhero culture, war movies seem too real. Well 12th Man is a film of fantasy and fervour that’s ultimately very accessible and as thrilling as anything that climbs the box office charts. Who would have thought then that the director of high-style kids films Agent Cody Banks and The Karate Kid (Harald Zwart, 2003 and 2010) would come through with a solid World War II thriller? Clearly, the Dutch director is happy to slip away from the frontline in order to deliver what the film needs. So it’s fascinating to see how he handles a more personal story.

Beginning with the claim that “the most incredible events are the ones which took place”, 12th Man is a survival epic about Jan Baalsrud, the one survivor of a Norwegian resistance boat sunk by a German warship, who begins a dramatic escape attempt from the Nazis in hopes of getting to neutral Sweden. As much as this is a historical reenactment, 12th Man takes joy in being a nostalgic boys own adventure, with ski chases, gunfights, and Baalsrud running from a fighter plane.

But Baalsrud is far from James Bond. Early on his gun is jammed by the frost and he sustains a horrendous injury that forces him to rely on the good-natured folk he meets. Thomas Gullestad as Baalsrud delivers a great, steely performance, showing the Leos of the world that you can depict determination and creeping madness without actually sleeping in an animal carcass . There’s a great scene where Baalsrud keeps waking up from nightmares, which turns into a horrifying dark night of the soul as he suffers from gangrene. His character reminded me of Boris Plotnikov’s hobbling martyr in Larissa Shepitko’s snowy resistance masterpiece The Ascent (1977). That film casts a long shadow over 12th Man, Zwart paying homage with a few visual nods. The atmosphere of the film strikes an icy tone that puts across the sub-zero temperatures. One early, extended shot has Baalsrud swimming away from camera and into the total darkness of the fjords, the water lit to convey sheer forbidding.

A surprise to see Jonathan Rhys Meyers showing up as the mad, vindictive SS officer Kurt Sage, who heading up the chase is timing himself in ice water. There’s no way anyone could have survived, he is told. But Sage hunts after the ghost anyway. This dynamic shows promise in the first act, but it never gets fully fleshed out. It’s a thankless role of a man who’s always a few steps behind. His inability to get up close to Baalsrud stops the men, from really learning about each other.

This is hardly the first Nazis in the snow movie to emerge from Norway (does anyone remember Tommy Wirkola’s 2009 Dead Snow?) and it’s one which uses Baalsrud’s perseverance as a national symbol. The northern lights are used in symbolic and literal ways as a sign for the characters, and there’s a real emphasis on members of the villagers and resistance fighters who helped Baalsrud on his journey.

Zwart lays on the inspirational messaging a little thick, the individual stories of the resistance fighters are probably the least interesting part of the film, because we’ve seen it all before. POWs singing in defiance, young children imparting wisdom beyond their years. The sentimentality really holds up the pace of the film, which, when it’s moving, has clear, motivated action that doesn’t let go of its audience. It’s a little too long to be a great action film, and isn’t quite bold enough to break free of its genre trappings. 12th Man remains a solid and well-told film with an action style movie.

The 12th Man is in selected cinemas across the UK and also on VoD on Friday, January 4th.

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:

Dunkirk

Posted on by mjbstaging

British filmmaker Christopher Nolan – now one of the highest-grossing film directors in history, with the Dark Knight Trilogy under his belt – has created a complex and multilayered film that cleverly interweaves three separate narrative strands: 1) on land over a week a young soldier (Fionn Whitehead) after he arrives alone at Dunkirk beach and falls in with others (including the music superstar and heartthrob Harry Styles); 2) on sea over a day a small, requisitioned, civilian boat (crew: three) go to bring home trapped combatants; and 3) in the air over an hour three Spitfires fly a sortie. Nolan is fascinated by time and runs these in parallel so that an incident partly revealed in one strand is later retold in another revealing more. There’s a constant sense of the clock ticking differently in the three time frames: mind-bending and exhilarating stuff.

The impressive analogue 70mm IMAX version puts you in there as if you’re escaping death on the way to the beach or in a Spitfire cockpit shooting at/being shot at by the enemy. It has everything you expect from a big screen war movie that small scale drama Churchill lacks. It’s a remarkable insight into the dirty side of being part of a war. The issue is survival: if not everyone can be rescued, who will be? The top brass organising the operation led by Kenneth Branagh must confront this issue to transport the maximum number of men home.

For those who are not familiar the events, the film depicts the Dunkirk evacuation of Allied soldiers from the eponymous beaches and harbour of France, between May 26th and June 4th 1940. It is believed that the extremely risky and unexpectedly successful operation saved the 330,000 British, French, Belgian, and Canadian troops from almost certain death under the surrounding German Army. Hence the “Miracle at Dunkirk” accolade.

As in the best horror films, anyone can die at any time. Not that this is a horror film. English soldiers are gunned down by French friendly fire. Spitfire pilot Tom Hardy’s broken fuel gauge makes him reliant on the pilot in the next plane relaying how much fuel that plane has left. Civilian boat captain Mark Rylance sails into a war zone with no weaponry or means of defence so he can rescue combatants. Shell shocked soldier Cillian Murphy completely loses it and injures someone trying to help him.

Men trapped in a beached boat are fired on from outside the hull by unseen assailants. People are trapped in spaces large or small which water threatens to fill cutting off their air supply. Swimmers covered wholly or partially in oil from crashed aircraft are forced to choose between staying underwater and not breathing and coming up to breathe when an inferno rages above the surface. Life and death situations.

Nolan manages some worrying tilts at British society circa 1940 which resonate today. A young soldier reaches the beach and joins a queue to be told to go elsewhere as this line is reserved exclusively for the Grenadiers. Another soldier who doesn’t speak much is accused by others of being a German spy. And an airman who nearly drowned in action is asked by an embittered evacuee, “where were you when we needed you?” British conformism, value judgments and prejudice are alive and well in the fight for survival. But so too are heroism and being prepared to give one’s life in the fight for a better world. Britain, now as then, is both good and bad.

Dunkirk, however, is consistently good. In fact, it’s likely the most impressive film you’ll see this year. It’s out in the UK on Friday, July 21st (2017). See the analogue 70mm IMAX version at BFI Waterloo London, The Science Museum London or Vue Printworks Manchester if you can.

On Amazon Prime on Thursday, April 1st (2021). Also available on other platforms.

Watch Dunkirk‘s two IMAX trailers below:

And here:

And click here for our review of another British historical film set around the same time, and still out in some UK cinemas.