An Odyssey

Emily Wilson, now arguably the most famous translator of Homer, is understandably concerned with promoting the Odyssey. In her LRB review of Christopher Nolan's new film, she acknowledges that her translation is " flying off the shelves", but I suspect she worries that many of those sales will be for the purposes of bookshelf adornment and Instagramable content rather than engagement with the text. Her review is a plea for that engagement. In contrast, Nolan is making a film that necessarily fillets the book to provide a primarily visual narrative in which there is little verbal poetry but a fair amount of clunky exposition. It is An Odyssey rather than The Odyssey. Wilson is not a Nolan fan: she finds most of his work boring, grandiose and superficial, her one backhanded compliment to his film being that her teenagers enjoyed it, but she does pay him the respect of engaging critically with his films, noting the common themes of discontinuities in time, vengeance and recovery, and a strange preoccupation with drowning. In her review, she consequently emphasises what Nolan does not - the sex, the humour, the glory - to remind us that there is much more to the book. 

But the difference in the media is ultimately all that their difference in opinion comes down to, despite the best attempts by the press (another medium) to talk it up as a fight or even as more grist to the "culture war" that started with the illiterate ravings of Elon Musk when he discovered that Helen wasn't played by an Aryan (presumably he'd have been OK if Charlize Theron and Lupita Nyong'o had swapped roles). Ironically, "talking up a fight" is pretty much at the core of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, something that Nolan makes explicit when Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, tells Penelope, his doting queen, that the war is really about trade routes (i.e. access to the Hellespont and thence the Black Sea), not honour. The exchange highlights that the film is really a conflation of the two books. That in turn explains why even at 3 hours a lot of the second book was never going to make it to the screen (Telemachus's visit to Nestor, the extended sojourn with Circe, the Nausicaa episode). 

One lesser known scene that remains is the raid on the Cicones, on the coast of Thrace, after Odysseus and his men have first left Troy (this is improbable, as they're meant to be heading south, but anyway). Nolan has a captured local speak unintelligibly to the Ithacans, actually in modern Greek. This is an early sight of a key theme of the film that originates hors-texte: that the returning Achaean Greeks were actually the feared and mysterious Sea People. There is no historical substance to this, but it works as a device in a film that places much emphasis on the tropes of disguise and misdirection. "You have the eyes of Athena" is a phrase that approaches cliché, as does the sometimes laboured explanations of Zeus's Law (xenia) being justified as a beggar might be a god in disguise. You might think that Nolan is making broader points here about hypocrisy and class injustice, but a simpler explanation is that he is using those parts of the epic that lend themselves to the screen: impersonation, double-crossing, revelation. The same principle applies to the Trojan Horse, which doesn't appear in the Iliad and is only mentioned incidentally in the Odyssey.

The two works are quite different. Not only was Homer a collective effort, spread over centuries, but there were two distinct collectives, unrelated but with overlapping influences, representing different oral traditions. The Iliad is an ethnic origin legend that seeks to root Greek culture in the mythos of Mycenae, not unlike the way that Europeans long sought to locate their own racial genius in Classical Greece, a tendency that persists among suburban Americans with their Molon labe bumper stickers. In contrast, the Odyssey is a patchwork of Eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern tales that echoes Gilgamesh and foreshadows the Arabian Nights. As a quest (actually two, that of Telemachus and his father) the Odyssey would influence Medieval literature and later, as a collection of incidents centring on food, sex and hubris, the emergence of the picaresque novel in the sixteenth century, from where you can trace a straight line to Modernism and the epic and bathetic retelling of the adventures of Odysseus and Telemachus in James Joyce's Ulysses.

But enough about the literature; what about the film? Nolan's decision to combine the two is interesting because The Iliad isn't particularly cinematic, as Wolfgang Peterson proved with his Troy in 2004. Warfare is actually an often dull subject on the screen: an impressive spectacle (Ridley Scott is arguably the pre-eminent director of this genre, as in Kingdom of Heaven or Napoleon) but one that struggles to connect emotionally (Scott's notable exception being Gladiator). 10 years before the walls of Troy is grim in anybody's book. The tendency to foreground the individual isn't just about the limitations of the budget, as Homer himself proved with Achilles and Patroclus. The Trojan Horse is a ridiculous plot device to a modern audience (surely the Trojans couldn't be that stupid?), and in Nolan's hands an improbable feat of artistry as well as engineering. It certainly doesn't look like it was fashioned from broken ship planks. But we accept it as the symbol of deception (of both the Trojans and Sinon), and as a portent of the coming divine vengeance as it burns in the conflagration of Troy. It's also worth noting that the Trojan scenes owe more to Virgil's Aeneid (such as the character of Sinon) than to either of Homer's works. Likewise, the film's ending owes more to Tennyson's Ulysses, which in turn links it cinematically to Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings.

Nolan's syncretic approach bears fruit inasmuch as the film has a clear narrative line. Amusingly, it is less convoluted in its chronology than the original poem, which is full of flashbacks and tales within tales, and thus something of a departure from his earlier time-bending films such as Memento and Dunkirk. What it shares with those films is a focus on story over style. Nolan is interested in the technology of filmmaking, not only in his use of IMAX but in his dedication to "real world" illusion (The Prestige), to editing as time manipulation (Interstellar) and to the construction of narrative (Oppenheimer). But that last is very much about the construction, not the quality of writing. Nolan had been nominated for his screenplays but has never won a major award. His Oscars and BAFTAs are for best picture and best direction. In his interview with Christopher Frayling in Sight and Sound, Nolan states "What I was trying to do, actually, was to get through the text and have it disappear and get to the events." That comment comes after his admission that while he read Wilson's translation, he read many others too. So, no love lost there.

In that interview he cites Akira Kurosawa's Ran (an adapation of Shakespeare's King Lear) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (the biopic of a Medieval icon painter) as influences on the film, the one for its spectacle and grandeur, the other for its historical immersiveness. But I think you could make as good a case for Kurosawa's Yojimbo. That also makes more sense when Nolan cites Sergio Leone, who adapted the tale of a trickster warrior as A Fistful of Dollars, both in the stylised confrontation of the assault on Eumaeus and in the use of a diegetic sound that punctuates the drama: in Leone a pocketwatch (For a Few Dollars More) and in Nolan's film a plucked bowstring. Nolan also admits that the final scene of The Planet of the Apes was an inspiration for the setting of the Trojan Horse, listing to its side and part-buried in the sand like the Statue of Liberty, but again the bigger influence of that film may be in the theme of a desperate desire to return home only to discover that you were the alien all along. 

Frayling attempts to broach the subject of Uberto Pasolini's 2024 film The Return, which covers the same ground as the second half of Nolan's film, but the director politely shuts him down. However, that film lingers in the background in Frayling's next question about the choice of a consistent accent: contemporary American ("Mom" and "Dad" both feature in the dialogue). While Nolan swerves the convention of the baddies in a sword-and-sandals film being RP-speaking Brits, it means his film lacks any real class dimension. Jon Bernthal's Menelaus, the King of Sparta, could have appeared in The Godfather, if he'd improved his table manners, while the social hierarchy that protects Antinous and exploits Sinon has to be patiently explained. In contrast, The Return employs a range of accents. We know Eumaeus and Eurycleia are slaves because they have non-English accents.

Pasolini's film is the superior drama, informed by Fiennes's Shakespearian chops (see his 2011 version of Coriolanus), Binoche's familiarity with Greek drama (she has appeared on stage as Antigone), and their evident screen chemistry (Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, The English Patient). But the most striking comparison between the films may be in the role of Antinous, played in The Return by Marwan Kenzari as an Iago-like character, whereas in Nolan's film, which is actually truer to Homer, Robert Pattinson thoroughly enjoys himself as a cowardly braggart. Nolan's casting of Matt Damon as Odysseus (like Jason Bourne, a resourceful character who must recover his memory) makes cinematic sense. We must identify with Odysseus sufficiently to excuse the climactic mass murder (incidentally, Telemachus killing the slave women is unsurprisingly omitted from the story because, well, it's Tom Holland). Equally, we must identify with Penelope's faithfulness, as played by the doe-eyed Anne Hathaway. The ambiguity and suspicion about her husband's return that Binoche displays is nowhere to be seen.

In Homer, Odysseus is semi-divine: he speaks with the gods; he is deceitful, as they are; he shags around, as they do. Nolan's hero is more like a desert hermit, with Calypso as an occasional temptress rather than a long-term lover. His visions of Athena (played by Zendaya) are presented as symptoms of PTSD, as he recalls the Trojan temple girl beheaded before him and other war crimes. Odysseus is guilty of dishonouring xenia, Zeus's law, by the gift of the wooden horse. His long journey home is an extended lesson in hospitality and the consequences of breaching it. Insofar as Nolan's film has a politics, it is founded on the liberal ideal of carefully-calibrated generosity to those less fortunate, the recognition that all we have to fear is fear itself (the Sea People are us), and a refusal of the supernatural in favour of rationalism. That last might appear odd in a film based on a text in which the gods are everywhere and decisive, but Nolan's Odysseus regularly defies them and he just as regularly disenchants his credulous crew.

Nolan's film is a good watch. I've seen it twice now, once on IMAX (I am intimately familiar with Anne Hathaway's pores in a way I never expected to be) and would recommend that bigger frame if you can manage to see it. It is big enough and bold enough to bear the weight of all the cultural history and the modern criticism thrown at it, which is why I think contributions like Wilson's are ultimately more helpful than hindering. It is a fascinatingly rich and rewarding subject, and while I don't think Nolan's interpretation is the most adventurous or challenging, it has every right to expect to be the definitive version for the next few decades (I doubt Elon Musk's mooted AI version in the original Greek will prove a hit). My chief regret is that Nolan didn't cast Fiennes and Binoche before Pasolini did, but that would likely have resulted in a smaller budget and Nolan is probably no longer capable of making a film under such constraints. He reached his cinematic apotheosis with Oppenheimer and doesn't look likely to return to the realm of the mortals just yet. He is on his own odyssey.

The Zone of Uninterest

Corey Robin recently published a post about how opinions on Israel are rapidly changing among Jews. It is heavily ironised, and stands at the intersection of the literary traditions of awakening conscience and the Jewish-American experience (his own style owes not a little to Philip Roth), but the essential point I'd like to focus on is his recognition of that rapidity: the sense that there has been a sea-change in opinion and understanding. He quotes a number of statements by prominent Jews, introducing them as follows: "I’m posting these statements here just to give you a sense of how quickly opinion is changing. And it’s not Israel-haters and antisemites or self-hating Jews who are voicing the alarm. Most of these individuals below continue to identify as Zionists, as liberal Zionists, and of those who no longer identify as Zionist, they come by their positions honestly, as I hope you will see."

What changed in recent weeks was the incontrovertible evidence that the Israeli government is engaged in a deliberate policy of starvation, with some members of the cabinet openly advocating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, an intent reinforced by Benjamin Netanyahu's current proposal for the IDF to occupy the entire territory for an indeterminate period of time. What changed was the IDF murdering Palestinians queuing for food in what can only be described as a killing field. The decision of a number of Western countries to signal their intent to recognise a Palestinian state next month, along with the long-overdue and still tentative steps towards an arms embargo by the likes of Germany, have been symptomatic of this wider sea-change, rather than contributory factors. They are evidence of the realisation of governments that have willingly supported Israel that they are way out of line with their own electorates, and are increasingly out of line with liberal Jewish opinion globally.

Many of the people cited by Robin discuss the issue in terms of crossing a line: that Israel has gone too far, and risks losing its soul in the process. Perhaps the most interesting citation is of Avrum Burg, a former interim President of Israel and Leader of the Knesset who is prepared, at least rhetorically, to address the more existential issue - essentially the entire history of the state since 1948 - but who frames this in terms of Israeli/Jewish loss: "Could it be that the current State of Israel, that its body stronger than ever and its spirit deader than ever, no longer deserves to exist? Not because of what happened on October 7, but because of everything that came before, and everything that has erupted since….The destruction of Gaza is a damning indictment of Israel’s moral bankruptcy. And we must face the truth: Israel without an ethical foundation has no justification to exist."

There is a well-worn trope in the literary treatment of Nazism and the Holocaust of the cultured German officer listening to Schubert after a hard day's work overseeing the gas ovens. Beyond the inherent class bias in this image, which assumes the ordinary German soldier was an unthinking brute in comparison, there is this idea of loss: how could a culture that produced Schubert lead to the Final Solution? Where did Germany's soul go? The problem with the "crossing a line" framing is that it suggests a step back could be taken across that same line, like the German officer coming to his senses as he listens to Erlkönig, feeling pity for his victims and understanding that he is the evil-doer. But that is obviously absurd. While some Germans bravely resisted the Nazis, most did not, and those officers in the camps were selected precisely because they were true-believers who would feel neither shame nor guilt. 

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt (another writer Robin has long engaged with) famously wrote of "the banality of evil". The book caused a furore (and continues to divide historians) both because it described Eichman primarily as a careerist rather than a fervid antisemite, and because it highlighted the complicity of some Jews in the facilitation of the Holocaust. The first charge is problematic because it suggests Eichmann's behaviour was the result of incentives, rather than any commitment on his part over-and-above career advancement. At the close of Jonathan Glazer's 2023 film The Zone of Interest we see the Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss retching as he descends the stairs of a deserted palace into the darkness. Is this his conscience rebelling? In reality Höss claimed to have realised the enormity of his crimes only days before his execution. Prior to that, his attitude when challenged was described as "apathetic" and having "a lack of empathy". I can't be the only one who saw a parallel between the film's scenes of mundane looting and videos of IDF soldiers cavorting with children's toys and women's underwear in the ruins of Gaza.

Western governments have gone out of their way not merely to support Israel's military actions but to provide it with every possible excuse to step back over the line: to be applauded for restoring a status quo ante bellum in which Gaza was already a concentration camp, blockaded and rationed to punish the Palestinians as a people. Keir Starmer's pompous conditionality is simply a route that Netanyahu can take, with minimal inconvenience, to ensure that the recognition of Palestinian statehood is once more deferred and Israel reaffirmed in the community of the Western powers. In reality, the momentum of events and the wider anger in Europe may see the UK isolated in September, perhaps only lining up alongside Germany, a country whose Staatsräson requires that it expiate its guilt over the Holocaust by giving Israel carte blanche (the embargo on arms that "could be used in Gaza" is obviously little more than a gesture).

But is it possible to step back over that line? It clearly wasn't in the case of Eichmann and Höss. You can't simply say "Sorry, we went too far" after committing a deliberate genocide. Robin quotes the academic Lihi Ben Shitrit: "As psychologists note, shame and guilt are similar and often appear together, but there are crucial differences. Feeling shame is associated with embarrassment over the actions of members of our group that we think negatively reflect on our group’s identity. Guilt occurs when we feel collective responsibility for the negative actions of our group members. Shame leads to avoidance — hiding, denying or looking away from such actions. Guilt, on the other hand, motivates reparative or restorative responses. Liberal Jews like myself need to overcome our shame, which pushes some of us to avoid or even deny the reality of Gaza. Instead, we must grapple with guilt; guilt not in the sense of personal culpability, but rather in our collective responsibility."

Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian provides an object example of that liberal avoidance, even going so far as to claim a "moral case for escapism", and thus superior virtue: "For it’s when we feel ourselves plunged into the abyss, when our despair at our fellow human beings pulls strongest, that we most need to look upward – and glimpse the stars." What Freedland is implicitly saying is that his shame will never become guilt, in Ben Shitrit's terms. In other words he will neither question the existence of the State of Israel, like Avrum Burg, nor concede that collective responsibility means that Western governments, complacement liberal media and Israeli society generally must be deemed as guilty as Netanyahu, Smotrich and Gvir. As with the reaction to Eichmann in Jerusalem, it is that second charge, of collective responsibility, that sticks in his craw.

All in the Family

Gothic is coded posh. Or, to put it another way, gothic is a romantic recuperation of the past in which ruined property represents the decline of a hierarchical order: the bare ruined choirs of an abandoned abbey; the forbidding castle of the absentee landlord. The persistence of social hierarchy, and the contemporary economic importance of property, mean that the gothic is never far from the surface of our culture. Unfortunately, this often gives rise to a fetishisation of the property and an unrealistic, even hysterical, treatment of social relations. A recent example is Emerald Fennell's film, Saltburn, in which a middle-class psychopath destroys an aristocratic family and inherits their country pile. You probably saw that coming a mile off, even without the signposting to Brideshead Revisited and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Two far superior films, with striking similarities in plot but which use the gothic in more varied and imaginative ways, are Joanna Hogg's The Eternal Daughter and Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers. Of the two, Hogg's film is the more obvious in the way that it plays with gothic tropes, but it does so precisely to wrong-foot expectations. Haigh's film is more subtle in its use of gothic themes, but that is because its class milieu is very different.

The Eternal Daughter re-uses the upper-middle-class mother and daughter from Hogg's two Souvenir films, Rosalind and Julie, but here both are played by Tilda Swinton. The film opens in suitably gothic style with mist and enveloping darkness as the pair plus dog arrive at a Welsh mansion, now converted to a hotel. The cabbie provides a tale-cum-warning. Naturally, the hotel is all but deserted, the receptionist is sour and unhelpful (she's Welsh and thus coded as resentful and lower class), and there are lots of noises in the night. The purpose of the visit is for some mother and daughter quality time, but it's clear that the relationship though loving is cool, even formal, with polite ministrations substituting for meaningful engagement. It's all very upper middle class in its emotional restraint and acceptance that there is an unbridgeable divide between the generations. There is also a strain of cynicism: Julie is covertly recording her mother's comments as raw material for a screenplay she is writing, which presumably reflects Hogg's own ambivalence about her autofictional approach to filmmaking.

It transpires that the building was one that Rosalind lived in as a young girl during World War II (it was owned by an aunt), and that she carries memories - some nice, some not so nice - of what occured there. Suitably cued, you're expecting something bad to happen and sure enough the dog goes missing. Julie enlists the help of Bill, an enigmatic member of staff, and they search the grounds. The dog then turns up in Julie's room. This is the signal for a tonal shift away from the gothic. Julie shares a drink with Bill, who offers advice on bereavement: Julie has lost her father and Bill his wife. She later hears Rosalind tell Bill that she, Julie, has no children and will thus lack a dutiful daughter to care for her in her old age. The film reaches its climax with a birthday meal for Rosalind at which point we suddenly realise that the reason we never saw both characters in the same shot was not because they're played by the same actress but because Rosalind was never there: she too is dead. Julie is at the hotel on her own, working on a screenplay (presumably this film) and thus conjuring up her mother's ghost. As the film concludes, we realise that the hotel isn't deserted, that the receptionist is solicitous and that the weather is fine. Further confusing expectations, the wise old head Bill turns out to be real, rather than another projection of Julie's psyche. 

A common and recurrent motif in both Hogg's film and Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers is the protagonist looking out of a window but in a way that suggests they are looking into the past rather than observing the present. Haigh's protagonist is Adam, played by Andrew Scott, a gay screenwriter approaching middle age who not only doesn't have kids but appears to have no friends: they moved out to the suburbs and country to raise families. Like Julie, Adam is in search of his dead parents and struggling to write about them. On a research trip to his modest childhood home in Sanderstead, he encounters a trim man in his 30s with a 'tache. What looks for all the world like a pickup turns out to be a visitation by his 80s-era father who takes him home where he is welcomed by his mother who recognises her now grownup son by his eyes. Just as Julie sought to establish a greater rapport with her mother, so Adam seeks to explain himself to his mum and dad, played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell. This primarily means coming out to them but it also means expressing what their loss meant to him. They died when he was only 12, after which he was brought up by a granny in Dublin (which explains Scott's accent). 

There's a degree of humour in the generational divide that veers perilously close to a 1970s sitcom, but the real subject is the unbearable weight of a love that cannot now be expressed even if the imaginative encounter with his parents provides the consolation that they would love him just as much now as they did when he was a shy and sensitive child. As with Julie and her mother, not only does Adam conjure his parents' ghosts but he is finally ghosted by them over a meal, in Croydon's Whitgift Centre of all places. The twist in this tale involves Harry, played by Paul Mescal, the only other occupant of Adam's London tower block, who offers human contact and warmth as much as sex, but who is eventually revealed to be another imaginative projection of Adam's mind but, tragically, extrapolated from an all too real person who is also now dead. Adam is lonely - pathologically lonely, adrift in a building that is improbably empty and constantly replaying the queer-coded music of his 80s youth: Erasure, the Pet Shop Boys, Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

The difference between the two films reflects the class of the parents and how this has affected the child's understanding of the world. Rosalind's emotional reticence and Julie's instrumentalism have left their relationship transactional. Gestures of care and tokens of memory - Julie's presents for her mother, her mothers stash of photographs - have become the medium of exchange. Honest expressions of feeling are avoided and when Julie's finally burst through they come across as self-pitying and selfish. In contrast, Adam's parents are more emotionally engaged - allowing Adam into their bed, relishing shared joys like dressing the Christmas tree - but their view of the world - dismissing "poofy shit" - was as typical of their day as the easy relationship with drink and cigarettes. Adam's loneliness is rooted in his belief that they could never have understood what he was experiencing as a bullied schoolkid: that he was effectively orphaned before their deaths in a car crash. Their return offers a chance for Adam to convince himself that it wouldn't have mattered: that they would have evolved with the times while continuing to love him for who he was and is.

The property in The Eternal Daughter has been lost to the family. It is now a commercial, and thus a slightly grubby middle-class, concern rather than a gentry family home with all its history of good and bad. Despite the early suggestions of ruin, the Welsh mansion is actually in good condition and a popular hotel. As such, it represents an optimistic view of changing social relations: evolving towards a more democratic if essentially capitalist future. The property in All of Us Strangers is cosy but also empty. Adam never interrupts the present owners of his childhood home. They aren't there just as there is no one, apart from Harry, in the block of well-appointed flats in London where Adam now lives, which feels more like an abandoned spaceship than a slab of prime real estate, an effect heightened by the vivid sunsets that Adam observes from his 22nd floor eyrie. This property is also capitalist but it looks more like an investment: the urban flat as safe deposit box for distant investors; the suburban home as a Thatcherite aspiration now found to be devoid of humanity. 

Gothic fiction is characterised by fear, the supernatural and the demands the past makes on the present. Julie fears a childless old age, Adam a life of loneliness. For both of them the supernatural is less a threat than a device that allows them to commune with the dead: a form of spiritualism for people who don't believe in spirits. The dynamic of both stories sets a time-limit on the past's demands - there is no haunting as such and the ghosts are a friendly as Caspar - and both protagonists come to realise that they must let the past go so that they, rather than the dead, can rest in peace. Both films ultimately supersede the gothic: Hogg's by highlighting the self-indulgence of the aesthetic and letting the light of day in; Haigh's by revealing that terror and inconsolable loss are quotidian emotions that affect us all, not the preserve of a social elite with refined sensibilities. Both are wonderful films. In contrast, the ending of Saltburn, in which Barry Keoghan's character cavorts naked through his newly-acquired palatial home, suggests little more than the masturbatory fantasy of an estate agent as imagined by someone who knows the correct cutlery to use on all occasions.

Tory Sovereignty

You don't watch a Ridley Scott film in the hope of a history lesson. The emperor Commodus did not murder his father, Marcus Aurelius, nor did he die at the hands of a gladiator in the Colosseum (he was actually drowned by a wrestler in a bath). So it seems churlish that Scott's Napoleon has been criticised for playing fast and loose with the facts, such as Bonaparte witnessing the execution of Marie Antoinette or the Battle of the Pyramids starting with the French firing cannons at the Great Pyramid of Giza (the site of the battle was actually 9 miles away). What the film does present is a traditional view of Napoleon, but that view is decidely the one generated during his lifetime and after by British propaganda, hence the traditional tropes of his sexual dysfunction, his callous disregard for his soldiers' lives and his megalomania. Scott's film is first and foremost an English film, embodied in Rupert Everett's enjoyably supercilious turn as the Duke of Wellington. You can understand why it has enraged many French critics. To be fair to them, it isn't as good a film as Scott's feature debut, The Duellists, which was also set in Napoleonic France, but the reaction is more to do with national sensitivities than cinematic craft.

The film obeys the usual rules of a Hollywood epic in that many of the supporting characters are English (even if actually Scots, Welsh or Irish). Tahar Rahim, as Paul Barras, is the only prominent French actor (he has an impeccable English accent). The American Joaquin Phoenix naturally plays the man of action, distinct from the silver-tongued Brits such as Ben Miles as Coulaincourt and Matthew Rhys as Talleyrand. He is a fine actor but miscast here, not least because we must believe that a bear of a man who looks every one of his 49 years can convincingly portray the character from 24 to his death at 51. The key physical characteristic of Napoleon was not sticking his hand inside his coat but the possession of boyish looks. Vanessa Kirby is likewise miscast as Josephine because she is too young, though she makes a decent enough fist of the part. The empress was six years older than the emperor. Had the film been a French production, it would have made sense to cast Benoit Magimel (also 49 but credibly boyish) and Juliette Binoche (59 and still able to play 20 years younger), not least because they have history as a couple (incidentally, they are excellent in The Taste of Things).

The film compresses the history, sometimes to the point of absurdity. For example, Napoleon's abdication in 1814 follows hard on the heels of the retreat from Moscow in 1812, as if the War of the Sixth Coalition, culminating in the battle of Leipzig, never happened. But one thing that does get a mention is the apparently dry subject of the Continental System, the attempt to stop the import of British goods that commenced in 1806 as a response to the British blockade of French ports. The prominence of this in the story owes much to its historic significance for the UK, notably in encouraging greater trade outside of Europe and reinforcing the strategic policy, formalised by Lord Castlereagh at the Congress of Vienna, of Britain's role in supporting the balance of powers in Europe while avoiding any continental entanglements. The role of the Continental System in exacerbating domestic recession after 1810 (it was a contributory factor to the Luddite revolt) and friction with the US (it was also a contributory factor to the War of 1812) are less noted.

The French are quite right to criticise the film as anti-French and pro-English, but they've tended to emphasise the former over the latter, which I feel misses the point. Scott is a Hollywood fixture but he remains a recognisably English director and one who subscribes to the romantic and conservative tradition of David Lean and Michael Powell. That might not appear obvious in films such as Blade Runner and Alien, but the themes of free will and motherhood have been constants throughout his career. I mention all this not simply because I like many of his films but because his latest has coincided with the resurfacing in politics of the perennial theme of sovereignty, the core issue of Brexit, this time in respect of the ridiculous and performatively cruel Rwanda scheme. Sovereignty means not only autonomy but the poessession of the power necessary to impose your will on others. Thus the term cannot be understood in a British context without consideration of the history of British power, and a useful place to start is the first great crisis of empire in the late nineteenth century occasioned by the loss of the American colonies and the threat, specifically of domestic contagion, posed by the French Revolution.

Napoleon has always been a figure who prompted mixed feelings in Britain. He curtailed the revolution and yet he also embodied the revolutionary spirit of ambition that upset the settled order. The trope of the asylum inmate who imagined he was the real Napoleon captured this ambivalence: the daring and the delusion. What Scott and Phoenix's Napoleon embodies is the idea of will, from his determination at the siege of Toulon to his decision-making at Austerlitz and Waterloo. His divorce from Josephine and marriage to Marie-Therese of Austria in search of an heir is presented as a petulant bending of the affairs of state to his personal satisfaction (in a parallel universe, Scott would have cast the suitably French surnamed Mark Francois as Napoleon and Nigel Farage as Wellington). The iconography of Brexit - the Spitfires, the white cliffs of Dover - dwelt on the patriotic resistance against Nazism of World War Two, yet there was always an under-current that saw "taking back control" not simply as the inversion of the colonial relationship - Britain as the occupied rather than the occupier, a rather trite intepretation beloved of liberals - but as a recovery of that imperial might: the power to do as we wished.

The latest troubles of the government over Rwanda have led liberals like Rafel Behr to decry the Tories' "neurotic obsession with immaculate national sovereignty". But this is to forget the lesson of Brexit, which is that national sovereignty, whether immaculate or otherwise, remains a powerful issue in the public mind. It wasn't immigration or asylum that tipped the vote in 2016 but sovereignty, however poorly understood or incoherent the concept. What remains unresolved in British politics, and what has been the underlying tension since the incomplete revolution of the 17th century, is whether it should be popular sovereignty or parliamentary sovereignty. Whether, in the contemporary context, our political system remains fit for purpose. When Behr scoffs at the idea that reality can be amended by a simple act of parliament, he isn't about to suggest that the will of the people should be untrammelled. He is advocating the conservation of a system in which parliament is constrained both by domestic and international law. That's a perfectly reasonable position to hold, but then so too is the belief that parliament should be unconstrained by either, even if it is advanced by the likes of Bill Cash. 

The power of Margaret Thatcher in the Tory mentality has less to do with private property or the restoration of class power, let alone the creation of a shareholding nation, than with the expression of national will, first in the Falklands and then against the "enemy within" of the NUM. It is that tradition, with its ancient roots in the Reformation and Shakespeare, not the recent derangement of Brexit, that powers the Tory tradition of sovereignty. In contrast, Labour has never managed to follow the logic of its role as the people's party and fully embrace popular sovereignty. As the party of the state apparat and the professional classes it has preferred to defend both parliamentary sovereignty (some of its staunchest defenders have been leftwingers with romantic delusions, like Michael Foot and Tony Benn) and the constraints of domestic and international law, though not without inevitable tensions, such as over the invasion of Iraq when Tony Blair's hubris approached Napoleonic proportions. Keir Starmer's project is to restore the authority of the state, but that inevitably means putting the genie of popular sovereignty back in the bottle, which is why talk of a return to the EU is misguided. If Ridley Scott fancies directing another historical epic centred on a dour man of will, I'd suggest he try his hand at Cromwell.

Arrested Development

The setting of Martin McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin is obviously meant to represent a larger canvas. Inisherin literally translates as Island of Ireland. But this may be just one of many misdirections by the writer and director who gleefully toys with the tropes of Irish history. Far from being about Ireland more generally, or the bitter falling-out of the Civil War during which the story is set (an offstage rumble, though with an oblique reference to the execution of 6 anti-Treaty men in Tuam in 1923), this is a more universal tale of a small community committed to superficial stability and social convention but sitting on a seething mass of resentment and spite. The central characters are Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) and Pádraic Súilleabhaín (Colin Farrell), long-time friends whose conventions centre on trivial chat at Jonjo Devine's pub. Aware that he is getting older and believing that he has a duty to develop his talents as a musician, Colm decides to end a friendship he has come to consider an unneccesary distraction. But on a small island, you can't easily avoid other people. 

Colm's solution is to tell Pádraic that he doesn't like him anymore, that he always found him dull, and that he wants no further intercourse. In plain terms, he won't speak to or acknowledge him. Pádraic, who slowly comes to appreciate that he may be the dimmest bulb on the island - the local soft lad, Dominic Kearney (Barry Keoghan) confuses him by using French words - can neither comprehend nor accept this rejection. His sister, Siobahán (Kerry Condon), urges him to move on, but he cannot. The setting for a Greek tragedy in the style of J M Synge is complete. Colm is solipisitic enough to believe that he can publicly admit this devastating truth and imagine that everything else will remain the same, but what he doesn't appreciate is that this act ripples outwards as it erodes the social glue of politeness and rubbing along, prompting first Siobahán to admit the truth (that her brother is dull if nice, that all the men are "feckin' boring") and then leave for the mainland, and then Dominic to commit suicide as he can see no future beyond the violent beatings of his policeman father and his own emotional and sexual frustration. 

There are anachronisms aplenty and many parodies of Irish culture, particularly as seen through the eyes of nineteenth century English writers: the animals in the cabin, the brother and sister in their 40s sharing a bedroom, the brutal policeman - more RIC than Garda - who doesn't have to fear popular justice or the IRA. One oddity is the idea that a small island would have a permanent police presence but that the priest would only visit on Sundays. The reality would have been the other way around. What I think McDonagh is doing here is emphasising that toxic men, represented by the policeman, Peadar Kearney (Gary Lydon), are the problem. Not only is he a domestic abuser, routinely beating his son Dominic, but he displays a callous indifference to others, whether they be condemned IRA men or Pádraic and his sister. The repressive social conservatism of the Catholic Church, though promoted by men, was associated in Ireland with the feminine: Mariolatry, the Magdalene laundries etc. It is consequently held mostly off-stage in McDonagh's script or played for laughs in the postmistress's snooping. 

When Peadar assaults him, Pádraic doesn't fight back, in effect adopting the feminine role, much as Dominic routinely does. Colm, witnessing the scene, wordlessly helps Pádraic to his feet and helps drive the horse and trap back to the Súilleabhaín home. The silence is as much about their shared shame as the newly-established rules of their small society. Colm will later punch Peadar, but this is literally knockabout comedy rather than intrinsic to the plot. Likewise, the scene in which Pádraic and Dominic filch a bottle of poteen from the Kearney house while the father sits drunkenly comatose and nude is an opportunity for the son to comment on Peader's "small brown cock", which is less a critique of toxic masculinity than an example of how it is internalised by boys as a style of rebellion against authority. The one character that rejects these male rules and assertively stands up for herself is Siobahán. She is a symbol of modernity, with her modern clothes and collection of books, though her manner and spiky language are anachronistic. 

Siobahán is balanced by the ominous Mrs McCormick, who is clearly the Shan Van Vocht (the poor old woman personifying Ireland) that inspired Yeat's Cathleen Ni Houlihan and Joyce's parody of the milk-woman in the opening scene of Ulysses. Pádraic's habit of hiding from her on the open road, and Siobahán's indulgence of the old crone's house-calls, exhibit the ambiguity of the younger generation's relationship with Ireland in the early twentieth century, but they also emphasise how pointless their self-delusions are as the old woman repeatedly catches them out and makes her contempt for their insincerity clear. Mrs McCormick is perhaps the most clear-sighted, as well as clairvoyant, character in that she has no illusions about the hatred under the surface and positively revels in saying the unsayable. As such she is a destabilising figure closer to a modern Irish iconclast like John Lydon or Sinead O'Connor than the saintly Cathleen Ni Houlihan.

But this toying with Irish literary culture shouldn't distract from a central narrative device that comes from the traditions of the big screen. Whereas the relationship of Gleeson and Farrell in McDonagh's earlier In Bruges was the classic odd couple familiar from buddy movies - of the older, wiser head and the impetuous youth - in The Banshees of Inisherin it is more obviously the comedy double act that provides the inspiration. The template might appear to be that of Laurel and Hardy: the fat fella with the delusions of grandeur and the thin fella as dim and innocent as the day is long (the pair famously inspired Samuel Beckett and in turn Harold Pinter, whose influence in McDonagh's plays is clear). But I think another, more recent inspiration might be Harry Enfield and Kathy Burke's creations, Kevin and Perry. The defining characteristic of Colm is not his overweening ambition (he is clearly a talented fiddle-player and composer) but his stroppy, teenager-like reaction to not getting his way. And the defining trait of all great comedy double-acts is frustration.

Frustration is the leitmotif that colours all of the main characters. Pádraic is frustrated by Colm's rejection and his own inability to mend the breach. Colm is frustrated in his attempts to devote himself to his music. Dominic is frustrated in his attempts to establish any sort of a meaningful relationship with a woman. Siobahán's seething anger is a study in frustration and petty indignities, from Pádraic's animals invading her home to the postmistress steaming open her letters. Where she differs from the men is that her attempts to have a richer, more meaningful life will ultimately be realised by leaving the island. Colm's parallel attempt to mature is thwarted by his inability to follow the logic of his own analysis, both in the realisation that he is being held back by his community and his cynical appreciation of the Church's role in maintaining it. His "despair" articulates this frustration, while his self-harm shows how it curdles into mindless violence: a obvious metaphor of the Civil War but more profoundly a comment on his own cowardice. He cannot take the route followed by Siobahán. He is trapped in a damaging relationship, but it is with Inisherin, not with Pádraic.

The two main characters are emotionally still children, hence Pádraic's innocent sleeping arrangements and his love of his donkey, Jenny, and Colm's self-indulgence and emotional blackmail. When Pádraic reports Colm's decision to Dominic the younger man tartly responds, "What is he, twelve?" And that's the truth of it. Colm is barely adolescent and Pádraic is a man whose moral and emotional development - his desire to be "nice" - appears to have stopped at the age of eight. This might be a case of McDonagh pointing up the immaturity of the Free State, but I'm inclined to believe that the larger canvas he is working on is that of masculinity and in particular the more extreme, self-pitying anti-feminism exhibited by the likes of Jordan Peterson and the Men Going Their Own Way movement. Colm's self-harm shows the absurdity of separatism; Pádraic shows himself to be easily-led by Dominic's foolish advice and willing to escalate from resentment to arson; while Dominic's death condemns both his father's violence and his own inability to mature and break away. That we can feel sympathy for all three characters is a testament both to the acting and the writing. A fine, sly film about men behaving badly.

French Film Blurred

One of the great themes of cinema is the experience of youth. This is partly because the medium lends itself to communicating the physical and emotional thrills of those for whom the body is effortlessly responsive and so much of experience is novel. Consider Alana and Gary running along the street in Licorice Pizza, or Buddy leaping through the air in Belfast, to pick two recent examples. But it also reflects the popularity of cinema among the young, which in turn means the demand for constant rejuvenation in a manner closer to popular music than literary fiction. Older, established directors and screenwriters receive due respect and can (usually) still get films made, but we hunger for new ways of seeing, new ways of telling stories, and that means new ways of encountering youth on the screen. This inevitably fuels the iconoclasm of youth, but that phrase is just a tired cliché. More interesting is the resentment of the old, specifically the generation who came of age in the 1960s - a time when TV was taking over from cinema but for that very reason the straitjacket was being eased off the older medium. Just as they criticised their parent's generation then, and derided the tame fare of the BBC, now they are criticising their children's generation, which came of age after the millennium and social media. 

I'm going to discuss this further by looking at three French films: two recent releases and one classic from 1960. Paris, 13th District (Les Olympiades in the original French) is in cinemas now. Gagarine had a limited release at the end of last year but is available online. Breathless (Au Bout de Souffle), Jean-Luc Godard's famous (and infamous) debut, enjoyed its sixtieth anniversary during the first lockdown. That they are all French means they are related sociologically as well as cinematically, but the wider social and political points apply well beyond the boundaries of France. Looking at these issues at one remove from the UK avoids the risk of the parochial, which is something all too evident in films like Licorice Pizza and Belfast: the one an arch comedy about a self-satisfied society in which youth is a commodity, the other a sentimental erasure of the political in which aged wisdom schools the innocent young. While those films compartmentalise youth, the two recent French releases engage it as a problematic, but with very different intentions. One sees the problem as the deficiencies of the young themselves, as if these were somehow independent of society (or even a threat to it), while the other sees the problem as the growing antipathy displayed by society (i.e. the middle-aged and old) towards the young.

In Jacques Audiard's Paris, 13th District, Émilie (Lucie Zhang) and Camille (Makita Samba) are solipsistic and selfish twenty-somethings who come together for economic reasons (flat-sharing), enjoy a physical if catty relationship, change jobs and generally don't get anywhere with their lives while irritating their families. There are moments of grace and humour, and plenty of convincing sex, but neither character is sympathetic, despite subtle performances by the actors. At one point, having dissed his sister's plans to become a stand-up, Camille's father tells him, "No one gives a fuck what you think!" [because you don't care about anyone else]. This feels like the director talking. In the third strand, Nora (Noémie Merlant) is a thirty-something but still naive woman, fleeing provincial life and a coercive relationship, who has become a mature but still aimless student. Her path will cross with Émilie and Camille, the latter sexually, but her chief relationship, and arguably the film's saving grace as a story, is the burgeoning one she enjoys online with Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth), a cam-girl whom Nora is mistaken for by her younger classmates after donning a blonde wig at a freshers party. 

Though a technically accomplished film, notably in its black and white photography (more reminiscent of Manhattan than anything in the French tradition, unless you count The Battle of Algiers), it is an unfocused story. This is less because it is essentially a portmanteau - knitting together three tales by the American comic book artist Adrian Tomine, now combined in a screenplay with original elements written by Audiard, Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius - than because it seems fascinated by the shortcomings of its young protagonists, which I suspect reflects Audiard's interests more than those of his co-writers. That Nora is a more sympathetic character suggests that this is where Sciamma's hand is to be found, a suspicion reinforced by Merlant's previous role in Sciamma's 2019 film, A Portrait of a Woman on Fire. Audiard is no stranger to misanthropy - A Prophet is a Hobbesian parable, Dheepan a French Taxi Driver - but here his target is specifically youth rather than mankind in general, and the chief charge is that they are stupid and unreliable because they are self-absorbed. 

Nora's classmates are presented as little more than a mob that is triggered into slut-shaming by the most trivial prop and the pernicious effects of social media. (As a rule of thumb, anyone who thinks social media is leading to the decline of civilisation does not know what they are talking about.) Though Nora satisfyingly clocks one of her tormentors in the street, there is little realism in this part of the story: none of her classmates appears to doubt the rumour that she is a cam-girl, while they appear to be as familiar with Amber Sweet as with a pop star. The developing romance between Nora and Amber is satisfying (both actresses are excellent) but it's also fantastical, and apparently designed to serve up the banal observation that relationships in meatspace are superior to hyperspace. While Nora's strand works better than Émilie's or Camille's, this is because it is closer to a fairy-tale: an innocent girl suffers a near-magical transformation and is saved from a hostile crowd and various predatory wolves through the intercession of a semi-divine character combining Godmother and Prince Charming. There is even a kiss straight out of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

In contrast, Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh's Gagarine is a story about youthful aspiration. The plot centres on the real-world decision to condemn and then demolish a Parisian housing project, the Cité Gagarine, which was named after the Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gargarin, who ceremonially opened it in 1963 (we see archive footage, notable for showing an already racially mixed community who have all dressed up for the occasion). Alséni Bathily plays the suitably named Youri, a young man whose mother is absent but who is part of a clearly supportive community that tolerates eccentrics and a peripheral Roma family including Diana, played by Lina Khoudri (recently seen in Wes Anderson's The French Disptach). Youri has taken it upon himself, with assistance by his friend Houssam (Jamil McCraven), to repair as much of the project as possible in the hope, vain as it transpires, of stopping the demolition. As the residents are decanted and their community broken up, Youri retreats into his fantasy of space flight, transforming a hidden area of the project into a spacecraft with hydroponic cultivation. Diana and Dali (Finnegan Oldfield), a petty drug dealer who is also disgusted at the destruction of the community, discover Youri's secret but both are eventually forced out by the authorities and he is left on his own: increasingly ill and withdrawn in depression.

Though it nods towards social issues, such as poverty and racism, Gagarine is really a film about sociability - extended families as well as the compact family (or crew) Youri briefly creates with Diana and Dali. The iconic moment is when Youri organises a community get-together to view a solar eclipse, rigging up screens to shield eyes and pointing his community literally at the nearest star. It is a symbol not of oppression or pessimism but of optimism and common purpose, as was the naming of the housing project, even if it turns out to be as fleeting as the eclipse itself. Gagarine is a film of much lyricism. Some of the photography is gorgeous and stands as a testament to the art and ambition of the novice feature directors, and it is ably supported by a lovely score by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine, the Russian brothers who provided the music for Andrei Zvyagintsev's 2017 film Loveless. For a French film, there are some notable British echoes, from Charles Crichton's 1947 Hue and Cry (Youri has a loyal following among the local kids) to Ben Wheatley's 2015 High-Rise (in which the protagonist must improvise among the ruins).

What distinguishes Gagarine from Paris, 13th District is that the young are not only varied in their attitudes and clever in multiple ways, but they are well-integrated into their families and wider communities. Houssam and Diana choose their families over Youri but never lose their respect and love for him. Youri's alienation from his mother is clearly atypical and presented as problematic, while in contrast Émilie, Camille and Nora's distance from theirs is presented as all too typical if regrettable (but with the blame mainly on them, Nora being a partial exception). It is also noticeable, by its absence, that social media does not dominate the lives of the young in Gagarine. The local gang, with Dali prominent, sit on plastic chairs in a common area to debate life and mock passersby, as such youth have done since time immemorial (of the two films, Gagarine is much the closer to I Vitelloni). The younger kids are occupied running around, doing what kids do. There's obviously a degree of sentimentalisation here, though thankfully nothing on the scale of Belfast (the feel-good sectarian bigotry film of the year), but there's also a lot of truth. The film orginated in a documentary about the break-up of Cité Gagarine. It didn't invent the community's cohesion or the kids' sociable behaviour, let alone manufacture its regret.

Breathless provides an interesting contrast to both films. The shallowness and self-absorption of the characters in Godard's startling debut - Jean-Paul Belmondo's petty criminal Michel and Jean Seberg's American drifter Patricia - have obvious parallels with Camille and Émilie, even if the latter are better educated and less pliable respectively (that's progress for you). The shock of the film in 1960 had as much to do with the director's use of characters that we struggle to actively sympathise with as the jump cuts, which weren't novel but had never been used so extensively. The latter were attributed to Godard's desire to cut the running time down to 90 minutes without cutting entire scenes, but perhaps by happenstance they also served to emphasise the characters lack of focus and disregard for consequentiality. Another recurrent trope is Patricia's uncertainty over the meaning of French words, which gives her a noticeably affectless air (I suppose that's the disadvantage of not speaking a second language, as Wire sang). It remains an impressive work, despite its rebarbative qualities, that mixes a fascination with American cinema (specfically what would become known in the 1970s as film noir) with the verité of war reportage (the Algerian War was still going on and Raoul Coutard, the director of photography, had been in Indochina) and the influences of Italian neo-realism and Franco-German existentialism.

What links Breathless and Gagarine is what the former occludes, namely the humanism of those others pillars of the French New Wave, Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Agnes Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) which bookend Godard's debut. In other words, if Paris, 13th District sits within a tradition of cinematic misanthropy and contempt (Godard would go on to make a film, Le Mepris, on just that subject in 1963), Gagarine sits in the non-Godardian tradition in which sympathy is central both to the main character's engagement with the world and their treatment by the filmmaker. One thing Breathless shares with The 400 Blows is the closing shot, in which Patricia and Antoine Doinel each look directly at the camera. But while both are challenging, Patricia's is a look that settles into disinterest and a reluctance to accept responsibility while Antoine's remains hopeful and engaged. Neither Paris, 13th District nor Gagarine attempt anything so provocative, but their endings are both different and comparable to those earlier works, the one urging compromise and maturation - in other words, surrender - the other that the young should hang on to their dreams and light up the world. Both films are worth the ticket price, but its is Gagarine that will leave you hopeful for humanity.

A Descent Into Madness

I've been going to the cinema quite a lot recently, which is partly a post-lockdown splurge and partly the coincidence of the London Film Festival, so I thought I'd regale you with my observations on two very different films with a common link. No, not Timothée Chalamet in The French Dispatch and Dune, though I'm sure there's a piece to be written about Wes Anderson and Denis Villeneuve's different approaches to fantasy. The two films are Robert Egger's monochrome The Lighthouse, which came out in 2019 but which I only got round to seeing at the Wimbledon Film Club this week, and Pablo Larrain's colourful Spencer, which premiered at the London Film Festival and is on general release from today. What links them is a descent into madness: the one in an extreme form that evokes Greek tragedy at its most prophetic and bloody, and the other in a more symbolic manner, centred on the slipperiness of personal identity, whose literary touchstone is Shakespeare rather than Sophocles (despite the ready-made parallel of Antigone, a princess condemned to a living tomb).

The Lighthouse is a two-hander that has obvious echoes of the dramatic form, from Beckett and Pinter to Steptoe & Son. Willem Dafoe plays the veteran lighthouse keeper (or "wickie") Thomas Wake, while Robert Pattinson plays Ephraim Winslow, the tyro with an obscure past (he turns out to be another man altogether, Thomas Howard, who has assumed the identity of a dead colleague). Brought together for the first time, they must spend a month on a remote island lighthouse, somewhere off the coast of New England in the late nineteenth century. On the day before their relief, after a grumpy co-existence marked by very different views on the apprentice keeper's character and work-rate, they are trapped by a fierce storm, which the superstitious old-timer thinks was brought about by the younger man's killing of an annoying one-eyed gull. With their supplies exhausted or spoiled and only strong drink for solace, they slowly, and then quickly, descend into madness. 

In terms of cinema, it's The Birds meets a low-budget Apocalypse Now, though you can also find visual references to everything from L'Atalante to Oh! Mister Porter and any number of classic Westerns. It's a supremely referential work, though this perhaps leads to excess in the screenplay, written by Eggers and his brother Max. The film could have been shorter than its 110 minutes. The largely voiceless scenes featuring other actors, notably the mermaid and the recollection of the actual Ephraim Winslow, whose identity Thomas Howard has taken after the former's accidental (but preventable) death, felt like off-stage references expanded in the translation to a more expansive medium. The debate over whether the film could best be described as a horror or a psychological thriller really relates to its length. If cut down to nearer an hour, and with less show (and blood) to augment the tell, it would have been closer to the tradition of the BBC's A Ghost Story at Christmas. Expanded, its padding tends towards the Hitchcockian, even in its conscious nods to George Cukor's Gaslight.

The literary references are extensive: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Moby Dick and Greek legend are perhaps the most obvious. Indirectly, the evocation of Coppola's masterpiece, which famously featured a shot of Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance and James Frazer's The Golden Bough on Colonel Kurtz's bedside table, points to a mysticism that marries Christianity and pagan ritual. There is confession ("spilling the beans"), thrice-times denial and blood sacrifice. The central motif is the theft of fire, in the form of the lantern, which Thomas Wake jealously guards. Winslow spies the old fella disrobing before it at night in an ecstatic, sexualised communion that reminded me of Danny Boyle's 2007 film Sunshine. The final scene sees the Promethean Winslow on a rock having his liver plucked out by a bird. Wake is both Triton and Proteus (the sons of Poseidon), the former explicit in one of his thundering speeches, the latter implicit in Winslow's suspicion of the older man's honesty and clichéd mannerisms. 

But Howard/Winslow is also protean and one of the features of the film is how Robert Pattinson seems to look at different times like a callow youth and at others like a hard-bitten veteran. This is less the actor's mercurial skill than the director's determination to unmoor the characters and make them seem more plastic and unreliable. In this vein Willem Dafoe revisits some of the madness of his Vincent Van Gogh (2018's At Eternity's Gate), while at other times he looks, and acts, like a miniature version of Charlton Heston's Moses from The Ten Commandments. Weaker actors would have buckled under the strain of a story that is often silly - the ripe language, the petty squabbles, the wanking and farting - but expected to carry a huge symbolic freight. The gap could have led to unintentional bathos but it's a mark of the film-maker's skill and that of the actors that it largely maintains the tension between the two, even indulging in some moments of outright comedy, such as the argument over the quality of Wake's cooking, which justifies the comparison to Steptoe & Son. 

Cuisine is also central to Spencer, an imagined tale of Christmas at Sandringham in 1991 with all the trimmings. The date places the events shortly before the publication of Andrew Morton's book on the Princess of Wales, which revealed the sham of her marriage, her and Charles's affairs and her suicidal thoughts. Diana, convincingly played by Kristen Stewart, teeters on the edge of a breakdown in the face of the Windsors' coldness and dedication to suffocating habit in food, clothing and blood sports. In the first scene at table she hallucinates eating her own pearls (if you're going to have an eating disorder, make it classy). She is deferentially menaced by a fictional embodiment of the royal establishment, played by Timothy Spall, who bangs on about service while regaling her with a bloody tale of a tour of duty in Northern Ireland, the one intrusion of reality that feels tonally uncertain in a film that is otherwise a clever ghost story in which Diana Spencer haunts the royals ahead of her own death. The subject of the film is identity. The princess is cast in the role of the Prince of Denmark, with a hint that "not to be" is her fate. Given that she's also the ghost, there's an obscure (and perhaps accidental) parallel here to Stephen Dedalus's theory about Hamlet in James Joyce's Ulysses.

In contrast, her husband, who is more usually associated with the tortured prince by our fawning media, is best summarised in the words of Nigel Molesworth as "utterly wet and a weed". In a difficult role, Jack Farthing manages to communicate both the man's fussy irritation and abiding immaturity through an economy of mannerisms and speech. The rest of the Royal Family are eminently forgettable, which is probably the most realistic feature of the film. To provide dramatic foils worthy of this heightened Diana, the screenplay invents not only Spall's menacing factotum but a sympathetic chef and a dresser, played by Sean Harris and Sally Hawkins, who personify elements of the fictional Diana's character (self-care and self-love) and are also representative of the people's otherwise mute chorus (the one scene that involves actual civilians, absent the press, sees them open-mouthed at her appearance in a roadside café as she seeks directions). 

The key scene between Diana and Charles, in which he lectures her about the need to divide oneself into public and private personas, features a snooker table and some passive-aggressive ball rolling. This is one of many clichéd tropes in a film that is perfectly happy to indulge them in spades: long corridors, candlelit dinners (both of which echo Stanley Kubrick), rocking horses and a midnight raid on a room-sized fridge. What holds all this together is a magnetic performance by Stewart and a Diana who is much more unpredictable than she was in real life - summed up by arguably one of the finest masturbation jokes ever commited to the big screen. Though the real-life princess was a fashion icon, the film goes beyond mere dressing-up to employ clothes as a motif of both the uncertainty of identity and the constraints of formality (every outfit has been planned in advance, there is no spontaneity). Early in the film she takes a scarecrow's battered and torn jacket, convinced it belonged to her father when they lived nearby, as a souvenir of her life as a Spencer.

What the two films share, beyond cooking and wanking, is the suspicion that an invented or adopted persona is a first step towards madness, which is obviously an in-joke for people who work with actors. Thomas Howard, pretending to be Ephraim Winslow, never makes it off the rock but Diana Spencer, trapped in the public character of the Princess of Wales, manages to escape temporarily, with her sons singing along in her open-top car, to an afternoon of obscurity and fast-food in London. Of course we all know that this is a temporary reprieve and that tragedy awaits. The other link between the films is that Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart became screen superstars together in the adaptations of the Twilight vampire novels. They have moved on to more substantial fare since, but both remain attracted to the roles of troubled characters with uncertain identities. If there is a moral to these two tales, apart from avoid lighthouses and Prince Charles, it is that you must make your own character or have it made for you.

Man Down

Leaving aside the zither, the initial theme of the 1949 film The Third Man, which is currently available in a 4K restoration on BBC iPlayer until the end of the month, is denial: I didn't see anything; I know nothing; I don't want to get mixed up with the authorities. This has an obvious resonance in the immediate postwar era when so many were insisting "I was never a Nazi" and the Austrian state was attempting, with the connivance of the occupying powers, to recast itself as the Third Reich's first victim rather than the country that birthed Adolf Hitler and welcomed the Anschluss. As the film progresses, denial gives way to confession and threat, and finally to betrayal. Many have seen the film as another expression of Graham Greene's overwrought Catholicism, with Harry Lime playing both Jesus and Satan: a man who rises from the dead and tempts Holly Martins while showing him the world from on high ("If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped - would you  really, old man, tell me to keep my money?") But that is to ignore what gives the film its unique stature: the central role played by Vienna itself - something that owes more to the direction of Carol Reed and his adjustments to the screenplay than it does to Greene's original story.

As a review of the Third Man Museum, an institution that reflects the Austrian ambivalence about the film, noted: "Beneath its modern polish, Vienna is still grand, absurd and slightly sinister: an imperial capital without an empire". The Viennese disregard for a film that exhibited the city's postwar embarrassment contrasted with its popularity in Britain. It might well have been less popular if the screen version hadn't cast Americans in the central roles of the charming sociopath and his old schoolfriend, and had instead stuck with the British characters of Graham Greene's novella. Instead, the British in the film - Major Calloway and Sergeant Paine representing hard power and the cultural attaché Mr Crabbin representing soft power - are portrayed as both honourable and useful. Despite Indian independence in 1947 and the early stages of the Malayan "Emergency", imperial decline did not yet obtrude for a British public still celebrating victory and focused on the domestic promise of the Attlee years. 

The post-imperial melancholia of the film would become more poignant as the UK retreated from empire and the administrative heart of London came to resemble Vienna in its faded grandeur (as a London Film production, the first thing you see on screen is a sooty Big Ben). The very title of the film would become shorthand for Cold War betrayal and the moral decadence of the British ruling class. This aesthetic resonance, together with the avoidance of romantic delusion, helps explain why the film continued to pack a punch and is still today regularly voted as one of the best films of all time (it topped the BFI's poll of the greatest Britsh films of the twentieth century in 1999). Though they represent an occupying power, Trevor Howard's Major Calloway and Bernard Lee's Sergeant Paine gradually come to seem like organic products of the city: cynically familiar with local mores and in tune with the wry humour of a people fallen on hard times. It is Joseph Cotten's Holly Martins and Orson Welles's Harry Lime who are most obviously alien, not only in their manners and respective ignorance and disregard but in their New World optimism, whether that of the crook who spies opportunity or the blundering naif who won't give up on either his friend or the girl. 

The ruins of the Austrain capital reflect more than the aftermath of World War Two. They evoke the trauma of World War One: the collapse of the "old Vienna" referenced by the opening narration (voiced by Reed) rather than just another Central European city flattened by carpet bombing. It is hardly coincidental that Lime's apparent death occurs in front of the statue of the Emperor Franz Joseph and the accident is witnessed by a Baron and a Romanian and then attended by a passing doctor, representatives of the artistocracy, multi-national polity and haute bourgeosie of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Though The Third Man's ruined landscape shares a superficial similarity with the Trümmerfilm of the late-40s, it is concerned with what lies preserved beneath the rubble, not just with what has survived on the surface. Holly Martins doesn't just metaphorically dig deeper into the mystery of his erstwhile friend's death, he literally descends into the underworld of the sewers. But the parallel here is not with Orpheus or The Divine Comedy but with archaeology: the uncovering of layers of history and meaning compressed on top of each other. 

This sense of compressed history is famously articulated in Harry Lime's speech on the Prater Ferris wheel, the Wiener Riesenrad: an aperçu that collapses 500 years between the Renaissance and the cuckoo clock. The theme of compression is also seen in the constant focus on time and urgency: the need for Martins to catch the next plane out, his late arrival at the book club, Anna missing her train, the final delay at the cemetery that risks Martins missing another flight. A counterpoint to the theme of compression is that of collapse: visually the physical destruction of the cityscape and more profoundly the moral compromises occasioned by wartime and after. As Baron Kurtz admits, "I've done things that would have seemed unthinkable before the war". Again, this sense of collapse and compromise carries echoes of the past. Anna Schmidt, played by Alida Valli, is not just a contemporary displaced person facing the threat of repatriation to Czechoslovakia, she is also a remnant of the shattered Austro-Hungarian empire and a rebuke to Britain for the Munich Agreement of 1938 (Calloway holding up her "papers" in his hand and sharing them with the Russians evokes Chamberlain).

Another reason why the film has stayed relevant was that it presented Americans as both naive in the face of Old World sophistication (Martins' profession as a pulp novelist can be read as a parody of Henry James) and callously indifferent to the suffering they inflict, a combination that would become a leitmotif of US foreign policy up to and beyond Vietnam. Though one of the occupying powers, the US military is invisible in the film's Vienna. In the opening narration, Reed oddly says of the four-man international patrols (American, British, Russian and French) that "None of them could speak the same language". This suggests a reluctance to recognise the US's role as the global hegemon and the inevitable subordination of the UK. If we track the evolution of Greene's thinking from the burden of the British empire represented in The Heart of the Matter to the delusion of the emerging American empire in The Quiet American, then The Third Man can be seen as transitional: the morally jaded bureaucracy of Calloway and Crabbin giving way to the fast-buck opportunism and blundering indiscretion of Lime and Martins.

Visually, the film betrays multiple influences, from prewar German expressionism to contemporary Italian neorealism. The acting is a goulash of styles, from Welles's bravura theatricality to Howard's reticence. Though Harry Lime appears relatively briefly on-screen, his presence is felt for most of the film in the ironic amusement of Anton Karas's eponymous zither theme. When Lime finally loses his self-assurance in the sewer chase, the music stops to be replaced by a diegetic soundtrack of running water, shouts and footseps, only to return with the inevitability of the terminal gunshot. Despite the tragic storyline and sombre style, and Greene's religious imagery, it's also a surpisingly comic film, from the running joke about people forgetting or mispronouncing each other's names to Wilfred Hyde-White's Ealingesque cameo as Crabbin. Though it clearly wasn't conscious design on Reed's part, the absurdist policing and camp subtext of the criminal gang, together with Calloway's leather coat and Paine's cheerful brutality, seem to prefigure Joe Orton.

What finally distinguishes the film is its complexity, which in turn reflects its messy realism. The characters are both believable and unpredictable. Motivations seem uncertain throughout and there is no sense of just deserts, despite the criminal enterprise foiled. The blameless Sergeant Paine is dead, and both Holly and Anna are adrift, facing uncertain futures. Harry Lime is finally brought to rough justice, but he clearly invites his own death at the end, further embroiling Holly in moral compromise and guilt. Anna literally walks out of the film in the closing shots, calling into question both the temporal and spatial limits of the story. Holly originally introduced himself to Calloway as the author of "Death at the Double X Ranch" (another satirical touch), but it is the British Major who is clearly the expert on the subject of mortality: "Death is at the bottom of everything, Martins. Leave death to the professionals". That both our first and last sightings of Calloway are at the cemetery is not insignificant. He isn't an angel of death, but he is a connoiseur of the passing of old orders.

Rabbiting On

Taika Waititi's JoJo Rabbit tells the story of a ten year old Hitler Youth member, a loyal if naïve Nazi ("massively into swastikas"), who compensates for his unpopularity as a squeamish nerd by imagining that Hitler is his friend. Naturally, this imaginary Adolf, played with relish by Waititi himself, is also a squeamish nerd, though one increasingly given to petulant rages that mirror the young Johannes "JoJo" Betzler's dawning realisation that Jews don't have horns and that the Fatherland may be heading for defeat. The trigger for JoJo's rapid maturing is the discovery that his mother is a member of the resistance and secretly harbouring Elsa, a teenage Jewish girl. When not interrogating Elsa for the book on Jews that he is writing, JoJo spends his time on Hitler Youth duties amid a collection of misfits, pyschopaths and his sole friend, the indestructible Yorki. It's a coming of age story, but it's also a commentary on the need for a measure of fantasy to maintain psychological health.

The film has been criticised as tonally clumsy and even flippant in its attitude towards the Nazis, with the implication that a lack of seriousness towards the subject is typical of a jaded liberal intelligentsia. In contrast, the film's champions have seen it as a story of hope and empathy in the face of the recent normalisation of the far-right in politics. In other words, the film is being read as a contemporary satire that either fails because it isn't vicious enough or succeeds because it is humane. It is insufficiently intolerant on the one hand, and "we go high" on the other. Margaret Hodge vs Michelle Obama. My own reading is different, you'll be pleased to hear. I think the key to the film, and the reason why it should be regarded as a sophisticated work, is that it isn't about the Second World War so much as the postwar reaction to it, and specifically how literature dealt with the proximity of horror and humour, from Joseph Heller's Catch 22 to Spike Milligan's Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall.

For most of the critics, the reference points are films that attempted to satirise the Nazis, such as Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator and Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, or more recent works that sentimentalised the Holocaust, such as Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful and Mark Herman's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. But JoJo Rabbit isn't really a satire of Nazism, any more than Mel Brooks's The Producers was. Just as that film was a satire of showbusiness, so Waititi's slapstick and verbal wit is concerned with the role of contemporary cinema. The better comparison would be with Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. What the two films share is a more-is-better attitude to irony and a soundtrack that nods to David Bowie (the theme from Cat People and Heroes respectively). When Captain Klenzendorf prepares for his own Gotterdamerung at the film's climax, it is pure glam. In fact, Bowie might have been good casting for the part, though Sam Rockwell in eye-shadow is certainly enjoyable.

This Nazi world seen through the eyes of a child is absurd, but not simply in terms of its mad ideology or the moral evasions of its people. It doesn't make sense, or no more sense than the parallel universe conjured-up by Tarantino. Everyone in the picture-postcard small town appears well-fed and smartly-dressed despite it being the final weeks of the war, with armies approaching from every direction - "Even the Canadians". There is no shortage of weaponry and Hitler Youth camping trips are still being organised. The death of JoJo's sister is never explained, nor are the circumstances of his mother's capture and execution. Yorki finally decides he has had enough of being a child soldier in a paper uniform and should return to his mother ("I need a cuddle"). This is a landscape straight out of a fairy tale, not an exercise in cinema verité. As a study in delusion, it owes more to Harvey than A Beautiful Mind.

The film is also not engaged in a sentimental celebration of the human spirit, or the survival of decency amid the horrors of war, despite the humanising narrative arc of JoJo's relationship with Elsa. There are moments of heroism, such as when Klenzendorf covers up for Elsa during a visit by a faintly Pythonesque Gestapo squad, and Yorki remains a beacon of innocence throughout, like a diminutive Good Soldier Svejk, but these reflect a live-and-let-live attitude rather than any adherence to principle. Many of the characters have something to hide: JoJo his imaginary friend, his mother her resistance activities, Elsa herself, Klenzendorf his homosexuality. The only one who seems unburdened is Yorki, though his worldview is not without pathos. JoJo's final rejection of Hitler is a moment of self-acceptance, but Yorki got there before him: "I guess I'm just a fat kid in a fat kid's body".

Rather than other films, what JoJo Rabbit reminded me of were two books: Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Both were made into films but neither fully captured the feel of the novels. I've not read the original story, Caging Skies by Christine Leunens, but I understand Waititi's screenplay is radically different both in plot (there is no imaginary Hitler in the book) and tone. What I think Waititi takes from Grass is the self-absorption of the child who believes he can influence the world around him. What I think he takes from Vonnegut is the idea that only the fantastic can allow us to conquer the terrible. It's hardly an original thought that we must leave behind childish fancies in order to face the terror of existence, but JoJo Rabbit makes the further point that adults can never fully escape the desire to recover that childishness and that sometimes surrendering to it is the only fit psychological response. In a round about way, he's mounting a defence of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.