One of the much-hyped jewels in the crown of the family-friendly BBC holiday season is this new three-episode adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's much loved novel by Heidi Thomas, the writer of Call the Midwife.
From Nicholas Hytner and Alan Bennett’s wonderfully nostalgic version of The Wind in the Willows through Coram Boy, the international smash hit War Horse and beyond, the National Theatre has a startling track record in turning what used to be patronisingly regarded as “family shows” into first-rate theatre.
What was it about the privileged male Victorian/Edwardian British writer that led to such a fantastical outpouring of books for children that were to embed themselves so thoroughly that they have stayed with their readers into adulthood?
Theatreland is currently awash with pantomimes and rehashes of A Christmas Carol, so all credit to this ambitious new production, an adaptation of the 1935 children’s book, The Box of Delights. Long before Narnia, poet laureate John Masefield was concocting tales of children dispatched to mysterious country houses for safekeeping but encountering deep magic, time travelling and talking anim
Genuine emotion does battle with gerrymandered feeling in Wonder, which at least proves that the young star of Room, Jacob Tremblay, is no one-film wonder himself. Playing a pre-teen Brooklynite who yearns to be seen as more than the facial disfigurement that announces him to the world, Tremblay is astonishing once more in a movie that feels as if it wants to break free of the formulaic but can't quite bring itself to do so.
Icelandic writer-director Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson has made an impressive feature debut with this story of crossing the threshold from childhood to young adult experience. Heartstone acutely and empathetically catches the path from innocence to experience of its two 14-year-old protagonists, Thor (Baldur Einarsson) and Kristján (Blær Hinriksson), in which the film’s twin themes, coming of age and coming out, become uneasily intertwined.
Gudmundsson opens his story at a leisurely pace – and, at a few minutes over the two-hour mark, there’s no calling its rhythm hurried – as we discover the world in which the two teenagers live. It’s the summer holidays, and they’re loping around with friends, fishing from the harbour side of the remote village that is home. When a shoal of fish swims by unexpectedly, the kids are soon struggling to pull them out of the water fast enough, before casually bashing them to death on the concrete. It’s an indicator that nature here is coloured by tooth and claw (an allusion referenced literally in one early visual), without overmuch room for sentiment. Such a mood will colour the human development that follows, too.
But this is also nature, in the sheer physical sense, at its most impressive (pictured above). The craggy coast around the cluster of houses that makes up the isolated village rises up towards spectacular mountains, which somehow dwarf any human activity with their scale. In summer, as the light stretches around the clock, the beauty is awesome, memorably captured in Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s widescreen vistas. But we sense that when winter comes – Heartstone closes as the first dusting of snow falls – the cold isolation of the place will be as complete as the luminous airiness with which it seasonally alternates.
Coming-of-age stories like this, especially from Nordic and Scandinavian climes, are almost a trope of cinema, often defined by the gentleness of their revelations, the sometimes quirky benignity of their settings. Gudmundsson consciously avoids any such tenderness, with nature’s cruelties mirrored in the immediate human environment, like how the village’s older teenagers tease the younger generation. There’s a similarly sharp atmosphere at home, with existence for the sensitive Kristján dominated by a hard-drinking father, and family life for Thor – the nice irony of his name is emphasised by the fact that, though he’s determined and tough, he’s still a minnow in size – coloured by two elder sisters who are as unforgiving with him as they are with their single mother (Nína Dögg Filippusdóttir, a lovely performance).
The father has gone off with a younger woman, and any sympathy for their mum's tentative attempts to find someone to date in this backwater is notably lacking. We see what it involves for her when the adults get together for the village-hall dance – a thrash, if ever there was one – and her attention falls on the outsider Sven (Søren Malling, a visitor in every sense: he’s Torben, from Borgen). Nevertheless there’s a sense of tough-love affection in this family unit that is finally reassuring, as well as an element of comedy to the sisters, Hafdis (Ran Ragnarsdottir) particularly; she writes poetry of Plath-like intensity that she reads out at meals.
Contrasting yet complementary female company comes with Beta (Dilja Valsdotttir) and Hanna (Katla Njalsdottir, pictured together above), with whom the boys tentatively explore the first hints of sexual consciousness at furtive sleepovers, which come with games of Truth or Dare, the forfeits precipitating different kinds of intimacy. Gradually the unsuspecting best-friend closeness between Thor and Kristján becomes something more complicated, though the scenes of revelation are laced with a lightness that allows for it all to be treated as game-playing. The ramifications become clearer in an episode in which the four of them go camping on their own in the mountains, where the landscape itself seems to pull a response from Kristján that he somehow can’t resist.
Gudmundsson treats the repercussions of his story with understated sensitivity: Heartstone may have won the “Queer Lion” at last year’s Venice film festival, but the sexuality here is one of exploration rather than action (Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy is one other such film that comes to mind). In all such tales of the growing self-awareness of youth, the quality of the playing from the young cast is crucial, and Gudmundsson has drawn hugely sensitive performances from his two leads. The landscapes that surround them may be monumental and memorable, but the sincerity and naturalness of these two performances is almost microscopically exact.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Heartstone
La Belle Sauvage, the first instalment of Philip Pullman’s eagerly-awaited new trilogy The Book of Dust, opens in the Trout, a rambling Thames-side pub on the outskirts of Port Meadow, north of Oxford. Here all kinds drink: scholars, labourers, watermen; gossip and taunts are exchanged over the bar; peacocks stalk the river terrace, haranguing customers to privilege them with snacks.
They’ve done it in a boat and a barn, a former poorhouse and even a tunnel shaft, and now Pop-Up Opera bring their latest production to a museum. Bethnal Green’s 19th-century Museum of Childhood provides an evocative frame for Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, its glass display cases and carefully glossed and labelled toys setting the tone for a production that takes a wry, curatorial approach to its material.
Director Jakob M Erwa's Centre of My World may be a coming-of-age story, but it’s definitely not a “coming out” one. Youthful hero Phil (Louis Hofmann) has barely reached the third sentence of his voiceover narration before he tells us he’s gay, and absolutely fine about it. There may be plenty of other emotional dysfunction in Phil’s world, but concerns about his own sexuality don’t feature.
It’s an encouraging perspective to start from, particularly when we remember that Erwa’s film is an adaptation of an acclaimed Young Adult novel by Andreas Steinhofel The Centre of the World (Die Mitte der Welt) that was published, and won prizes back at the end of the 1990s, when such assuredness about youthful gay identity might well have been considered the exception rather than the rule. There aren’t many external clues as to exactly when the director has set his film, though New Year fireworks with mention of the new millennium suggest we’re at about the same time that the source novel was published; our sense of the relative innocence of Phil’s world – or at least his place in it – is certainly accentuated by the absence of any of the later paraphernalia of adolescence such as phones or social media. 
Opening with Phil returning home from summer camp in France to discover that a storm has rather devastated the landscape of his small-town home, we sense that it isn’t only the trees that have been uprooted. His twin sister Dianne (Ada Philine Stappenbeck) has gone inexplicably distant, and something has clearly damaged her relationship with their free-spirit mother, Glass. That unusual name isn’t the only thing that makes Swiss actress Sabine Timoteo stand out, and rather fragile to boot: she has never let on to them who their father was, and appears catastrophically unable to keep a man in her life. She even has a ledger listing her past male involvements that has fascinated her children, particularly in their earlier life, of which we see quite a lot in rather overdone flashbacks to an almost parodically blond youth. They all live happily in a rambling country home that’s known, for reasons that aren't divulged, as “Visible”, which is certainly not what could be said about understanding what the family actually lives on, no hint of any daily grind apparent on their balmy horizons. (Pictured above: Louis Hofmann, Ada Philine Stappenbeck, Sabine Timoteo)
Despite such hurdles, Phil has grown into an attractively balanced – and just plain attractive, the youthful beauty quotient of the film, aimed at least partly at the teen market, being considerable – adolescent. His ease about his sexuality – it’s revealing how writing those words brings home how much, and for how long we have assumed, narrative-wise, that growing up gay is bound not to be easy – has been clearly been nurtured as well by the presence of a nicely grounded lesbian couple close to the family, who reliably step in when Glass is having one of her brittle moments.
Yet 'Centre of My World' finally deserves rather more than sarcasm
If that wasn’t supportive enough, his boon companion Kat (Svenja Jung) is clearly delighted she has a GBF with whom she can share bicycle rides (the innocence!) and school gossip. Of which last the newest instalment concerns the appearance of new kid-in-class Nicholas (Jannik Schumann), whose beauty is such, even by this film’s standards, that Erwa introduces him in swooning slow motion. (It is a device, it has to be said, of which the director is inordinately fond, just as his predilection for kaleidoscope-like image-collages is pronounced, too). Cue, we might assume, winsome longing on Phil’s part for this handsome, mysterious stranger…
Not a bit of it. The athletic Nicholas has barely done a couple of laps of the sports track before the two are making out in the shower (they aren’t strangers, in fact, having experienced a shared youth memory which gets rammed home by Erwa’s resorting to that old chestnut, “significant childhood object”). Support from the lesbians comes not only in listening to Phil’s “Is he the one?” musings, but in lending their summer cottage for assignations that look as idyllic in a tasteful soft porn sort of way as the flowers that blossom around the place.
For Phil, however, first love is a bloom bound to come with thorns. A whole range of denouements are due that variously tie up (or not) issues both in the immediate present and left hanging from that odd childhood past. Some of them inevitably bring pain, which we believe rather completely when it comes to Phil and his romantic upset, rather less so with some of the plot gimmicks lobbed at various other players. Yet Centre of My World finally deserves rather more than sarcasm. It may over-employ visual and other forms of gimmickry, and has a saccharine quality that is surely not knowing, but the film’s heart is in the right place. Its final scene, as Phil moves away from the world in which his life began, asserts just how much he has truly come of age – and that his journey has been a real one.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Centre of My World