All is Lost

Seen at the Birks Cinema in Aberfeldy

Cecil says: This is an extraordinary film in so many ways: there's no dialogue at all; in fact there's a cast of one, which makes it impossible to have a dialogue; it's the first film I've ever seen where I began to feel sea sick half way through; and that is no doubt down to the amazing camera work, often underwater; and yet I was gripped all the way through, although overwhelmed almost from the start with a total sense of foreboding and fear.

I'm writing this without seeing the Oscar shortlists, but surely All is Lost has to be in there at least for its camera work, and maybe even for Robert Redford as best actor.

Robert Redford carries the part off amazingly. There he is, lone yachtsman, having a bit of a kip below deck as the film starts, and we hear the sound of what at first seems to be thunder, but then, as water laps around his feet and little kids' shoes bob around inside the boat, we realise - at the same time as Redford's character - that the boat has been holed and is slowly filling with water as it flows in the waves through the gap...a gap made by an enormous ship's contained which has clearly dropped off one of those mega freight ships.

What follows is an extraordinary sequence of human survival techniques. There's a narrative, too, as one by one, all Redford's protection mechanisms are peeled away like an onion skin, starting with the yacht's communications equipment, through the very boat itself slowly sinking, to Redford's own skin, breached in an effort to retrieve some precious item or other before all was lost.

Slowly, this hi-tech yacht, is pulled apart - though Redford has amazing knowledge of the sea and of boats, leading him to try things I would never have dreamt of doing - and then, once he has jumped ship to his inflatable life raft, we watch things continue to spiral slowly out of control, through storms, sharks, ships not spotting him and flares not working.

He writes a goodbye note to the world - the same note we heard him read out at the start of the film when the screen was totally black. And he puts the note in a glass bottle, ready to throw out to sea, so that somebody one day will know what happened to him.

He hesitates before throwing it out. And for that brief moment, it felt like the Robert Redford of 40 odd years ago before the final scene in Butch Cassidy, when he and Paul Newman know they are about to be killed and have to decide whether to jump over the fence and shoot back. Completely different scenario, but somehow there's a connection: Redford at a key moment at the start and end of his film career?

I won't do a plot spoiler because in a sense the plot, and the end of the narrative, does not matter to this film. It is all about atmosphere, human existence, survival, and how on earth we cope with losing step by step everything that protects us from the elements. And you can't get much more in touch with the elements than being ditched from an inflatable into the middle of the Indian Ocean...

***.5

Bea missed out on this one, having to spend the day at work. But in a sense, it's appropriate to watch this film alone!