Film 985
FILM Omer Ali
INTERGALACTIC NOSTALGIA Tickets went on sale three months before Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens received its UK premiere on 16 December 2015, going nationwide the next day. To the satisfaction of fans and initiates alike, director J. J. Abrams eschewed the plastic feel of the series’ 1999–2005 prequels for the adventure and dry humour of particularly the first two films in the franchise: Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back (1977–80). The action is set 30 years after the third of the original films, The Return of the Jedi (1983). The First Order has grown from the ashes of the vanquished Galactic Empire and aims to destroy the New Republic – only the Resistance can stop it. This is probably Abrams’ masterstroke: to unveil new characters alongside such familiar faces as Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), and even hardware like the future-vintage Millennium Falcon spacecraft. Good old-fashioned action is delivered with the latest special effects – the stormtroopers look especially stunning in their sleek uniforms – amid a very warm glow of nostalgia, which excuses the film’s rare moments of torpor. Among the new characters, the film attracted stars-of-themoment Oscar Isaac and Adam Driver while introducing freshfaced Brits Daisy Ridley and John Boyega as the new series’ central protagonists, Rey and Finn (surnames and any family history are left tantalisingly open for upcoming episodes). Both acquitted themselves handsomely amid the stellar cast. The film was shot at Pinewood Studios – the production was considered such a boon to UK industry that it received £25m of public money from the UK government, earning thenchancellor George Osborne a personal mention in the closing credits. Among the many records broken by the movie, on its release The Force Awakens became the fastest film to gross $1bn globally – in 12 days – and achieved the largest worldwide opening (and the biggest single weekend ever) of $529m. It also leapt into the top three highest-grossing films of all time, having earned $2.7bn at the time of writing, and while it may make up the $120m gap on second-placed Titanic (1997), it’s unlikely to catch Avatar (2009), at $2.8bn. Globally the film did notably better in English-language countries, perhaps thanks to the well of familiar touchstones Abrams dipped into. It grossed £123m at the UK box office, knocking James Bond’s 2012 outing, Skyfall, off the all-time top spot. CRAIG’S BOND SWANSONG?? Skyfall, of course, was followed in October 2015 by the 24th instalment in the Bond series. Spectre consolidated the franchise’s retooling under the stewardship of director Sam Mendes and star Daniel Craig, although a much-hyped ageappropriate relationship in the film – with Italian Monica Bellucci as the widow of an assassin – proves to be short-lived, as 007 teams up with the latest in a line of French actresses to grace the franchise: Le´a Seydoux. She certainly adds punch to the many action scenes – the film opens with a head-spinning turn at Mexico City’s Day of the Dead festival – but Christoph Waltz is underwhelming as an overly familiar Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Spectre’s tech theme gives a nod to the Edward Snowden revelations but Blofeld’s scheme for world-domination feels oddly remote and unthreatening. While rumours raged that this may be Craig’s last outing as 007 – in May 2016 Mendes revealed he would not be returning as director – and the spotlight inevitably turned to possible successors to Bond’s tux, the producers might do well to concentrate their efforts on delivering a truly dastardly baddie. BEARING WITNESS Son of Saul treads territory previously mined by Martin Amis in his 2014 novel, The Zone of Interest: the Sonderkommandos, work
units of mainly Jewish inmates who helped other prisoners at Nazi concentration camps to their deaths before usually being killed themselves. Hungarian director La´szlo´ Nemes pitches the audience into the heart of Auschwitz, revealing the anatomy of the monstrous death machine that operated from late 1941 to 1944. Nemes’ camera hangs on the shoulder or directly confronts Saul, a member of the Sonderkommando played by poet and big-screen debutant Ge´za Ro¨hrig. Clearing the gas chamber, Saul finds the body of a boy he believes to be his son, and embarks on a disastrous, 24-hour attempt to provide him a proper burial. It’s an intense journey, marked by Ro¨hrig’s ashen face and mute eyes: bodies are known as ‘pieces’ in camp slang and there are hints too of the hopeful reasoning behind taking these apparently traitorous, fatal roles – as one of the narrators of Amis’ book has it, ‘We, the Sonders, or some of us, will bear witness.’ Son of Saul won the Oscar for best foreign language film. US director Tom McCarthy bears witness in an equally methodical manner to a more recent trauma in Spotlight, which focuses specifically on child sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests in Boston and, by extension, wider abuse by the church around the world. McCarthy’s marquee cast includes Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Stanley Tucci and Liev Schreiber for what is essentially a newsroom drama, played out at the Boston Globe in 2001–2. Spotlight was named best picture at the Academy Awards, where it achieved the unusual status of becoming the first winner of that award to win fewer than three Oscars since The Greatest Show on Earth in 1953. Oddly, British historical drama Suffragette, about women’s struggle for the right to vote, didn’t receive any nominations from the Academy, BAFTA or at the Golden Globes. Written by Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady), directed by Sarah Gavron (Brick Lane) and produced by Alison Owen and Faye Ward, it stars Anne-Marie Duff, Helena Bonham Carter and Meryl Streep (as the group’s leader, Emmeline Pankhurst). Horrified by the abuse of young women employees at the factory where she works, Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) reluctantly becomes part of the movement, and subsequently has to face her unsympathetic husband (played by Ben Whishaw) and Brendan Gleeson’s patriarchal police inspector. Perhaps the film lost its way from the moment Morgan chose to concentrate on a composite character, instead of a real-life figure. (Natalie Press also features as Emily Davison, who died after stepping in front of the king’s horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby, the film’s main set piece.)
LIFE BEGINS IN THE 1950S Two literary adaptations fared better with critics and audiences. Carol is based on Patricia Highsmith’s semiautobiographical novel The Price of Salt, first published pseudonymously in 1952. Rooney Mara stars as reticent shop girl Therese Belivet, who falls for married mother Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett); their affair proceeds slowly until the moment of consummation, which may also spell its bitter end. Director Todd Haynes showed in his previous excursion into the 1950s, Far from Heaven (2002), that he has a perfect feel for both period atmosphere and trapped emotions; the film’s time-capsule look owes a great deal to designer Sandy Powell’s costumes. In March 2016, a poll of more than 100 film critics, programmers and other experts for the British Film Institute’s Flare film festival named Carol the best LGBT film of all time. In Brooklyn, Saoirse Ronan plays a young Irish woman in 1950s Ireland who, unable to find a job at home, emigrates to New York. Initially she struggles to make her way in the city and only when life seems to be improving is she pulled back to Ireland, to care for her ailing mother. Nick Hornby adapted Colm To´ibı´n’s novel of US immigration to great effect, where