Country darkness falls quickly when Alice (Ruth Wilson) goes back to the farm. She stops before entering to gratefully absorb the Yorkshire countryside’s sunny beauty.
Take one of the strongest casts in British cinema and put them in a confined space; it was always going to be fun. Sally Potter’s The Party sets its sights on the duplicitous liberal elite, where venality hides behind paper-thin morals.
Janet (Kristen Scott Thomas) is hosting a get-together in celebration of her promotion to Shadow Health Secretary. Her husband Bill (Timothy Spall) is strangely quiet, barely acknowledging the arrival of their guests: the brilliantly sour April (Patricia Clarkson), her new-age life coach partner Gottfried (Bruno Ganz), feminist academic Martha (Cherry Jones), and her pregnant wife Jinny (Emily Mortimer). Once coked-up banker Tom (Cillian Murphy) joins proceedings, the pleasantries fall away as Bill reveals his big secret.
The exposition-heavy dialogue creaks through the opening 10 minutes, with every character explaining each other’s jobs and relationships as if being tested. It’s unsubtle, but it puts the pieces in place, allowing the film to swiftly move into anarchy. Every character is vain and hypocritical, desperately battling their own impulses to appear tolerable. When secrets start spilling over, fragile factions form in a pressure cooker environment, allegiances quickly changing with each reveal.
Once in full flow, it’s a pure joy to watch; the cast have a riot, bouncing around the rooms to an eclectic soundtrack provided by Bill’s record player. There are moments of true comic gold, from The Thick of It-style implications of the Shadow Health Secretary’s husband going private for a terminal diagnosis, to the daft panic when searching for the right music to revive a dying man. Disappointingly, the ending peters out with a whimper, unable to find a satisfying conclusion to the madness. The final reveal attempts one more rug pull, but it feels cheap in comparison to the excellence preceding it.
It’s easy to imagine The Party starting life as a stage play, with its single setting and elements of farce, but it is a visual treat on the screen. The black and white presentation gives events a surreal grandeur, turning a middle-class suburban home into a monochromatic stage. Close ups of frantic faces (in particular, king of the crazed looks Cillian Murphy) build a claustrophobic atmosphere, highlighting every twitch as an amplified tell.
The house itself was a purpose-built set, as revealed in the special features on this release. After scouting various locations, production designer Carlos Conti and director Potter combined their favourite elements to create the ideal layout on a soundstage. The documentary on its construction is surprisingly fascinating, showing the lengths gone to make the rooms appear convincingly lived in. It emphasises the role that the house plays, perfectly designed to appear simultaneously spacious and suffocating on film.
Also included is a huge collection of interviews from the entire cast, along with Sally Potter and the film’s producers. It confirms that the script’s wit and depth was a major draw for the cast, who can demand hefty fees on more commercial vehicles. It’s a shame that the presentation of the interviews is so unimaginative, nothing more than soundbites presented with minimum effort. Still, it’s more than most British indies offer on home release, and worth it for that hour of perfect madness.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Party
While this well-crafted documentary chose to open with footage of the stars and glitz of the American awards ceremonies, the focus of Working with Weinstein (Channel 4) was almost entirely on Harvey Weinstein’s involvement over more than 30 years in British cinema.
Clio Barnard has quietly been building a reputation as one of Britain’s most human storytellers. Her debut feature The Arbor was a mesmerising look at the life of playwright Andrea Dunbar, blurring the line between documentary and performance.
Fakery is promised in the opening image of The Mercy. A smiling beauty water-skis over sunny seas, only for the camera to pull away and reveal she is part of a maritime expo in a vast exhibition hall. One of the other exhibitors is an inventor called Donald Crowhurst (Colin Firth), who enlists his beaming sons to demonstrate his Navicator, a simple tool to guide sailors on the high seas. Optimism is laced with a tincture of despair.
Daphne, the independent feature debut from director Peter Mackie Burns, was released to little fanfare last year, a fact somewhat emphasised by the other films advertised on its DVD release – Moonlight and Lady Macbeth – more lauded releases from distributor Altitude Films. Even the special features fail to commemorate anything but the trailer.
Get Carter’s imitators tried to recapture the laconic violence of a very local gangster film. Get Carter’s makers swapped Newcastle for Malta, and a sunny, absurdist farce which is among British cinema’s unclassifiable one-offs.
Paddington 2 is that rare thing, a sequel that is more engaging than the original by dint of having a far better baddie. In the first film Nicole Kidman’s villainess was a bleached rehash of Cruella De Ville or Morticia – and it was far from her finest hour. She simply didn't convince as an evil taxidermist intent on giving Paddington a good stuffing.
The sequel replaces Kidman with Hugh Grant, who steps into the kind of role that the late Alan Rickman once made his own. Grant plays Phoenix Buchanan, a neighbour of the Brown family living in the same chintzy crescent. Buchanan is a washed-up actor reduced to starring in dog food commercials, given to lamenting the lack of decent stage roles and hectoring his agent. The plot revolves around Buchanan and Paddington pursuing the same hand-made pop-up book but for very different reasons.
While the bear wants to buy the book as a gift for his centenarian aunt back in Peru, Buchanan knows that it contains secret clues that will lead to a treasure trove of cash. Paddington gets into comic scrapes doing odd jobs to earn enough money to purchase the book, the dastardly thespian deploys all the costumes in his closet to steal it, framing Paddington in the process. Grant (pictured above) is clearly having a whale of a time with the silly accents and outfits; his dancing finale is well worth the ticket price.
The film is something of a rest home for British actors, all of whom provide predictable performances. The returnees include Hugh Bonneville as bumbling dad, Sally Hawkins as kindly mum, Julie Walters as salty housekeeper and Peter Capaldi as the local xenophobe. The novelty acts are comfortingly familiar – Brendan Gleeson (pictured below), Tom Conti, Joanna Lumley, Jim Broadbent, Imelda Staunton and Eileen Atkins all muck in. It must have been like a drama school reunion in the canteen. But one wonders if writer-director Paul King has consciously decided to avoid the criticism Richard Curtis regularly receives for all-white casting; there are also very decent cameos for Richard Ayoade, Sangeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal and much diversity among the minor roles.
Prettily made with some nifty animation and some very enjoyable slapstick gags, Paddington 2 is ultimately an insidious advert for the capital. This is a fantasy city made up entirely of Instagram-friendly locations – it becomes a game ticking off sightings of Primrose Hill, Little Venice, the Regent's Canal, Portobello, Albert Bridge and St Paul’s Cathedral. In King's version of London, even a newspaper vendor can afford to live in a pastel-hued Victorian terrace and (nearly) everyone is essentially nice. It’s ironic that a tale of an illegal immigrant from Peru dreaming of bringing his elderly dependent relative into the UK will convince even more tourists to come and enjoy theme park London. If only it also included instructions about which side of the escalator they should stand on…
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Paddington 2
Sweet isn’t the right word; in Mike Leigh’s 1990 film, life is unfair, frustrating and confusing by turns. Though, despite the darkness, Life Is Sweet exudes positivity and remains one of Leigh’s funniest, most quotable features.
There are many outstanding things in writer-director Francis Lee’s remarkable first feature, and prime among them is the sense that nature herself has a distinct presence in the story. It brings home how rarely we see life on the land depicted in British cinema with any credibility. God's Own Country is a gloriously naturalistic depiction of the harsh life of farming, of an existence based on close connection to animals and to the earth, set in the Yorkshire countryside in which the director grew up. For a comparable sense of connection to the rural environment, and of the sheer back-breaking work that comes with that link, we have to look elsewhere – to Zola perhaps, or Italian neorealism.
Closer to home there’s much in God's Own Country that resonates with DH Lawrence, his sense of the primal rhythms of life and death, and the way in which the emotions of these working lives are often expressed with a minimum of language. Lawrence has a poem titled “Love on the Farm”, which could work as an alternative title for Lee’s film – except that love is as far from the mind of its main character, twentysomething Johnny Saxby (played by Josh O'Connor), when we first encounter him as anything could be. In an early scene his grandmother catches his character perfectly when she calls him a “mardy arse”, local vernacular for his being moodily withdrawn (it was a nickname that Lawrence was called at school).
The sense of change feels somehow primal
It’s a world in which communication, particularly within the family, is virtually monosyllabic: the first words we hear Johnny speak, some minutes into the film, he addresses to a heifer, and he’s just had his hand inside her to check on her calf (we see a lot of hands exploring animals’ orifices in God's Own Country: Lee made his actors learn such tasks for themselves, no hand doubles here). With his father Martin (Ian Hart) in poor health, Johnny carries the responsibility for the farm on his shoulders, and there’s little else in his life to give it meaning. The fact that he’s gay isn’t an issue in itself – though it’s not spoken of at home – but sex has the same purely physical dimension as the drink he stupefies himself with at the pub every night. When he takes a cow to market, he has a cold fuck with a man who’s obviously an acquaintance, but the idea of continuing any human contact after the act is completed is alien to him.
Johnny’s world is a lonely one: his mother disappeared south at some stage in the past, unable to deal with the isolation and hardship of the farm. Grandmother Deidre (Gemma Jones, playing well beyond her accustomed range) has a sort of scolding affection for him, but she’s more than reserved with her emotions. A childhood friend has come back home for her university holidays – she notices how Johnny has changed, no longer “funny, like you used to be” – and suggests they have a night out in Bradford. When Johnny mentions the idea to his dad, the latter looks at him like he was talking about the moon.
All of which makes the arrival of an outsider an unwelcome disruption. Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu) has come from Romania to help for a few weeks with the lambing – he was the only applicant for the job – and Johnny’s hostility is immediate as he taunts him as a “gyppo”. They are going up to the higher pastures for the lambing, to sleep in a ruined hut and subsist, it seems, entirely on pot noodles. Then up there, when least expected, fate stumbles in: in this stark isolation the hostility between the two men turns into something else, Johnny’s anger giving way to tussling, and that into physical contact. At first they fight in the mud, rutting like animals, before a deeper contact slowly grows between them. They may still guy one another, but their words – “freak”, “faggot” – are no longer insults, rather signifiers of an new, joshing intimacy.
Lee convinces us of this changing dynamic with absolute filmic subtlety. There’s a sense that the bleak beauty of their surroundings, to which Gheorghe is receptive, has started to infect Johnny too, as does the sheer gentleness of the outsider. We see the Romanian bring the runt of a litter back to life and then, in a truly beautiful scene, coat it in the pelt of a dead lamb so that the mother sheep will allow it to suckle.
All of this is conveyed with such tenderness, expressed far more through images than in the very spare words of Lee’s script (his minimal use of music, principally tracks by A Winged Victory for the Sullen, is also all the more powerful for its sparseness). The sense of change feels somehow primal: simply, the two men come down from the hills different people. Johnny has started to feel things that he never knew he could, while for Gheorghe – everything we hear about his back story and homeland is unremittingly pessimistic, “My country is dead” – the possibility of settling, rather than wandering may have become real.
For these two who have felt so out of place in their different worlds, the chance to create a home has suddenly appeared, but Lee’s closing reel will test everything. Johnny, although capable of being surprised by joy, remains his own worst enemy: Josh O'Connor’s face has a remarkable, somehow lopsided vulnerability that conveys all that, and more. In these troubled days of Brexit, it’s salutary to find an outsider portrayed with such total respect. However he may have acquired it – most likely, we guess, though the school of hard knocks – Gheorghe has a self-awareness, and a self-sufficiency, that is both beyond his own years, and aeons beyond Johnny's.
Cinematographer Joshua James Richards portrays these landscapes, these faces with a subtle, surprise beauty that matches Lee’s pacing of his emotional narrative. It’s somehow cyclical, how from the barren earth of winter a new harvest will come forth; over the film’s closing credits we see just that, home-movie archive scenes of harvests past. There’s no praising God's Own Country too highly. Francis Lee may have come out of nowhere, but if we see another film as good this year, we will be lucky.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for God's Own Country