Come Back. Come Back To Me.

Oh, what a nice surprise it is to see Brenda Belthyn turn up in a film unexpectedly. I had no idea she was in Atonement, and when I saw her in the kitchen so early in the film I nearly wet myself. Sadly, her role was tiny. Sadly.


Atonement, director Joe Wright's second collaboration with Keira Knightley after Pride And Prejudice, is based on the best-selling and acclaimed novel of the same name by Ian McEwan. Set in the lead up to and then during the second world war, it is ultimately the story of Cecilia (Knightley), a young and beautiful daughter of a wealthy family, and her interrupted love affair with Robbie (James McAvoy), the son of a servant who died and has been almost adopted by Cecilia's family. All of this is told through the eyes of Cecilia's younger sister Briony (Saoirse Ronan in her younger incarnation, Romola Garai later in the film), the person responsible for the destruction of their relationship.

I must say, this dress is pretty stunning.

Briony has written a play, planning on premiering it the night she finishes using her cousins as the cast to celebrate the visit of her brother Leon (Patrick Kennedy), who is bringing with him his eligible friend Paul (Benedict Cumberbatch.) Cecilia and Robbie, meanwhile, have had a fight over a vase and are not speaking. Robbie writes a number of drafts of a letter of apology, and unfortunately puts the wrong one, a horribly crude version, in the envelope he gives to Briony to run ahead with. Upon reading it, Cecilia professes her love for Robbie, but they are interrupted in flagrante by Briony. Shortly after it is discovered their twin cousins have gone missing, apparently attempting to run away back to their parents.


All go out to search for the two in the dark, where Briony witnesses an apparent sexual attack on her remaining cousin, Lola (and is this name a reference to Nabokov's Lolita?), and as she had read Robbie's sexually explicit letter prior to delivering it to Cecilia, she convinces herself it was Robbie, whom she is in love with and angry at for spurning her. So starts the true drama in the film, with Robbie being sent off to prison and accepting an early release in return for fighting against the Nazis on the continent. Cecilia has disowned her family as soon as she could and is now working as a nurse, writing back and forth with Robbie whenever she can. Briony, perhaps as penance, also signs up to nursing school when she turns eighteen, and whilst in London seeks out Cecilia to apologise, realising what an egregious error she has made and how terribly she has treated her sister and Robbie.


I'm not a Knightley hater, but nor am I a lover, and I think she is fine here, not great, not bad, just... well, I think like Clooney, I struggle to see past Keira Knightley. Ronan is fantastic, and I have the time of day any time for McAvoy - I think he is incredibly underrated and such an extraordinary actor. Redgrave, playing the old Briony right at the end of the film, is powerful in her short time on screen, and Blethyn, despite hardly appearing, is fabulous as always. The movie is so well written, is founded in such an amazing screenplay, that it would be hard, I think, not to perform well within its bounds. 


The cinematography by Seamus McGarvey is nothing short of magical. The film looks incredible (helped by terrific production and especially costume design), and some of the feats achieved (such as that oft-cited long tracking shot through Dunkirk) are breathtaking. Almost all of the elements combine well to add to the power and beauty of the film without ever becoming a dominant force. But I do say 'almost' very deliberately. The score. The score often killed me. The inclusion of the initially diegetic typewriter as a recurring theme made me want to claw out my eyes. It was so distracting, I kept finding myself thinking about how irritating it was when I should have been immersed in the film. It totally drew me out of whatever frame of mind I was in. And it kept coming back! There were a few other diegetic elements incorporated, and after the typewriter clack I very much noticed every single one. It was eternally frustrating, and will forever taint my memory of a film that otherwise might have gone down as a memorable favourite from the last decade. But I just can't get that typewriter out of my head, every time I think of any scene or moment in the film. Clack. Clack. SHUT UP! Shame on you, Dario Marianelli. It might have been ok if used once, but all the way through was deadly. And to think it won him an Oscar. ARGH! Of course, if they hadn't been such pricks about Johnny Greenwood's There Will Be Blood score, this never would have happened. But I digress.


Despite the music, the rest of it was magnificent, magnificent enough to get 4 stars.

Don't Let's Spoil Everything, We've Only Just Met.

Michaelangelo Antonioni has a Golden Lion (for Il Deserto Rosso) and a Golden Bear (for La Notte), but only one Palme d'Or (from five nominations) for Blow-Up, his first English-language film from 1966. It is also the only film to net him Oscar nominations - two of them, for the screenplay and direction.

The film was quite controversial in its time, especially in the States, where it is purported to be the first film to receive a release despite featuring full-frontal female nudity (I kept my eye out for this nudity, and the only place I could pick it possibly being was so damn brief and improbable that it doesn't surprise me it was not an issue...) Taking place in the drug-fuelled 60s, the film follows a photographer, Thomas (David Hemmings), who, whilst inspecting an antique shop he wants to buy because the gays are moving into the area and he feels he can make a fortune off them, happens up to a park where he takes some photos of a couple cavorting. The female member of this couple, Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), confronts him, trying to get the photos off him, obviously paranoid about what they will reveal.


Jane follows Thomas back to his studio and again confronts him. Thomas is obviously quite successful - his studio is spacious, he has models coming in and out and girls begging to have their photographs taken - and he is not used to being spoken to like this. He hands her a different roll of film and she leaves. He then sets about developing the photos, and as he does he notices that there appears to be a man in the bushes with a gun. Later, with photos he took after the confrontation, he sees what he assumes to be a dead body, lying off in the distance.


Amidst a haze of parties and groupies, he grows more and more paranoid, especially when he returns to his studio to find the prints he had laid out destroyed and the original negatives gone - his whole place has been ransacked. He goes to the park and sees the dead body - he goes to his agent, who is at a party, and tries to bring him along to show him, but the agent is way too fucked to care, and Thomas stays at the party. The next morning, the body is gone - or was it ever there?


It's a hard film to peg down. What exactly is it about? It seems to me to be a riff on the times. Drugs were everywhere, celebrity was everywhere, parties were everywhere. Everyone who did anything and made any money off it was somebody, and that was Thomas. How many drugs had he consumed leading up to the episode of his life that takes place in the film? Who cares. Was there really a dead body? Who cares! What was Jane's motivation? Should it be seen that the burglary of Thomas' home means something untoward did go down in that park? Who cares. Maybe she was just with someone she didn't want to be photographed with. Really, really didn't want to be photographed with. And then maybe Thomas made it all up. But maybe he didn't. What's important is that Antonioni takes us inside this paranoia without resorting to tricks of psychology. He shows it as it is, luring us into a film that may not really mean anything, but by portraying what it portrays, means a hell of a lot.


It bears, I think, resemblance to films like Elephant, in that it doesn't try and explain. What it shows on screen is what it shows on screen. Yes, it tries to delve into what Thomas sees (or thinks he sees), but it never judges, it never tries to come up with reasons. It just is. And it is beautiful for it.


A compelling film, interesting, mesmerising, thought-provoking and intelligent, yet not so intelligent as to be self-indulgent. I'm dead certain it influenced a whole generation of filmmakers in some way, and I'm sure that, provided it is watched, will continue to influence those to come. Like so many of the major works of master filmmakers, the historicism of the film's placement within society is not important, because it is entirely irrelevant. What matters here is what happens between the lights going down and the lights going up, not on screen, but in the viewer. 5 stars.