We have decided to temporarily suspend our year-by-year viewing of the Oscar winners in order to spend a few weeks going through all the nominees of the 2018 Academy Award for Best Picture. We'll be watching and reviewing two a week, and this week we started with Call Me By Your Name and Darkest Hour.
Call Me By Your Name
Plot
A glum teenager in northern
Italy, Elio (Timothée Chamalet) becomes romantically obsessed with visiting
American academic Oliver (Armie Hammer). And.....that’s about it.
Doug says
Who cannot remember the blissful agony of calf-love? That’s
what Call Me By Your Name posits as
its main theme. It tells the story of a seventeen year old on the cusp of
manhood, and a handsome twenty-five year old student who have a sensual,
illicit romance in 1980s Italy. While the story is well-trodden and at times a
little false, the performances from Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer as the
young music prodigy and the swaggering American respectively are captivating
and truthful.
The real winner of this film though is the landscapes.
Director Luca Guadagnino uses angles, colour, shading and the beautiful Italian
landscapes to paint a vivid setting of languid heat. Italian people sit living
their lives at the edges of each frame – a woman fans herself in a waiting
room, another sits in the sun shelling peas. We feel the sunlight drenching our
skin, the refreshing cool of the abundant pools and lakes. Guadagnino makes
make us think of our own summer romances, and of course remember the exquisite
agony of how they always end.
I write this a few days after seeing it, and several of us
who went to the cinema together have found ourselves affected in different ways
and I think I understand why. The film centres around the themes of youth and
ripeness – Elio notoriously masturbates into a succulent peach (youth, ripeness,
skin, sex all intermingled), and they dredge up Ancient Greek-style statues
from the sea (youth and ripeness being most prized in their culture). But what
lasts from the film is the slow, sad realisation that many of those watching
this have already had these moments and have moved past them. Calf love and its
agonies don’t seem to reoccur. And we are left with the bittersweet realisation
that we may never be those heady, naive, vital people again who fall in and out
of love over the course of a summer. We end up mourning for the people that we
(hoped we) were.
It felt a little sparse at times – a monologue from Elio’s
Robin-Williams-lookalike father felt a little too neat (and therefore rang a
little false), but I can’t think of a film that has filled me with such longing
for my own past, and also for the pasts I might have had. The subtlety of each
gesture, word and moment means that the film’s power rolls on well past the
credits. I found myself wanting to dislike the film, but it triumphs
regardless. A sumptuous reminder of the cruelties and joys of the romances you’ll
never get again, and a mesmerising backdrop of Italian landscapes that make you
want to go there yourself, and be there in the dust and the heat with the
possibility that you might just seize the moment – this time.
Mark: 10 / 10
I'll also be pointing out the number of people of colour with a speaking role in each film. This is to see if the 'Oscars So White' scandal has actually had any effect on Hollywood's conscience.
People of Colour: 0 (Oh dear)
The best part of Call Me By Your Name is the way it captures
Italian rural life. The cinematography is so good that the perpetual heat, the
dusty buildings, the boredom, and the languorousness are all emanating from the
screen like the Italian heat itself. You become completely transported.
It also skilfully captures the complex emotions involved in
one’s first relationship. The soaring excitement, desire for secrecy, fear, bad
decisions, and vulnerability are all displayed in Chamalet’s award-worthy
performance. I defy you not to identify with him- or at least develop a lump in
the throat at his tearful final scenes. His performance is all the more
astonishing when you notice that the central romance relies entirely on
meaningful half-sayings and covert, inconspicuous forms of body language. When
Elio tells Oliver of his attraction to him, he doesn’t do it explicitly but
drops hints whilst they walk separately around a war memorial before their
bodies meet again on the other side. During their first sexual encounter, their
desires are so overwhelming that they literally inhale one another’s auras as
they writhe, rather than simply kiss. It’s balletic and gorgeous and
unconventional.
The film is, however, a bit inconsequential. Nothing much
happens other than the main romance. Whilst this reflects the inert nature of
lethargic Mediterranean holidays, I was occasionally begging for Oliver to
reveal some deep, dark secret to juice things up (Is he married? Is he a woman?
A Soviet spy? Anything!)
Nonetheless, this is a touching, beautiful and unpretentious
piece which captures emotions and moments with expertise and awakens us to a
gay erotic fantasy that we never knew we had.
Mark: 8/10
Darkest Hour
Plot
The UK, 1940. War is raging and
British politics are in chaos as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (Ronald
Pickup) is ousted and replaced with controversial eccentric, Winston Churchill
(Gary Oldman). Over the first month of his term as PM, Churchill tackles
Dunkirk, a push for peace negotiations and disloyalty amongst his own party.
The trouble with playing Winston Churchill is that John
Lithgow impersonated him in The Crown in 2016 to huge acclaim. While the
performance had the expected cantankerousness, the writers also weren’t afraid
to tackle Churchill’s darker side- his self-importance and deepest
insecurities.
Darkest Hour shies away from all this, preferring to present
him as the usual symbol of British patriotism. Gary Oldman gives a great
impersonation (in fact, he’s probably more accurate than Lithgow) but he’s let
down by the film’s insistence on staying as conventional and reverential as
possible. Netflix have been far more daring.
The film starts strong with director Joe Wright (who did
Atonement and Anna Karenina) introducing the man himself with playfulness and
irony. We first see him in bed and being unpleasant towards his new secretary
(Lily James- horrifically boring). But again, the film slips into a
conventional biopic about Winston overcoming various forms of antagonism. An
amusing scene towards the end in which Winston chats with some passengers on
the tube promises more humanity, but it’s an afterthought, and the flare dies
out again in place of big Shakespearean speeches and bland discussions of peace
vs war. It’s awfully disappointing.
Darkest Hour is saved slightly by a great central
performance from Oldman (he’ll probably win the Best Actor Oscar- blokes in
these roles tend to do so) and I liked Kristin Scott Thomas as Clemmie
Churchill, who has been nominated for Best Supporting Actress despite being
underused. But the film suffers from similar faults to The Iron Lady- it’s
dull, it’s rambling, its politics are diluted and unfocused and, to make
matters worse, the critics are all orgasming over it. Hmph.
Mark: 3/10
Doug says
Let’s not beat around the bush: this film is pretty awful.
It’s as if they decided to write a film about Churchill, chucked in some
original speeches and went ‘how do we fill up the rest of the film’? Dunkirk
gets mentioned briefly, then it swells to be the ‘crisis’ of the film and then
they change the subject, don’t finish it and put a caption at the end of the
film to the effect of ‘by the way, Dunkirk went okay’.
It’s a callous attempt to recreate Meryl Streep’s win as
Margaret Thatcher – put a renowned actor in the main role, impersonating a
British politician, write a shoddy film about it and hope to scoop up the
Oscars. But the thing is firstly Gary Oldman is not as good as Meryl. So it’s
an impersonation that seems probably pretty correct but seems to lack heart. He
wheezes and groans to his heart’s content but you don’t end up really caring
about him.
Secondly we are currently awash with Churchill performances. Timothy
Spall did a pretty good turn as him in The
King’s Speech. And then as Paul points out there’s John Lithgow
in The Crown: Season One. Lithgow
dominates Darkest Hour simply by not
being in it. His performance in The Crown
was so much better: subtle, full of reality and weakness – and ultimately so human and
relatable that he ended up stealing every scene he was in from under Claire Foy’s
feet. Oldman on the other hand does nothing. It’s an impersonation, it’s not a
role.
The one good scene (as Paul points out) is when Churchill
descends into the Tube and meets real people. But even then the writers can’t
hold back from saccharine daftness as the ‘real people’ all cheer loudly in
such a rehearsed saccharine manner that I felt actually repulsed. This film isn’t
so much spoon-feeding you patriotism as it is trying to water-board you with
the Union Jack.
Also I was so bored, I actually fell asleep for ten minutes.
Mark: 1 / 10
People of Colour: 1 (one scene: man on the underground, 2-3 lines)
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