1917

Seen in separate cinemas...

Bea says: As Cecil and I are not in the same city at the moment, I saw this alone at the Everyman in Glasgow, on a wet Sunday.  Sofa-style seats and tea/coffee/drinks brought on a tray made this a very comfortable cinema experience.

I did very much enjoy the 1917's narrative style - it feels like a long time since I've seen a film tell a story from start to finish without flash backs or the switching of storylines - and indeed only cover a short period in time, in this case about 11 hours or so.

The long takes have been much discussed in commentary and reviews on this film, and from what I can tell either make it a work of genius or a flop. For me, it fell somewhat in between.  There is a sense of distance (the most common criticism of the long takes), but I didn't find that took away from the film for me - after all, my ability to truly identify with a young soldier in the trenches of WW1 is going to be limited. It felt instead like hearing a story told - and from the credits I gather that's exactly how this film began.

The story is absorbing, beautifully filmed (with the Clyde standing in for northern France) , well-acted and certainly well-directed, and the time passed quickly as the film built to its resolution, which I won't give away.

However - it is rather derivative of the WW1/war genre, and did remind me a lot of the 1980s Peter Weir classic Gallipoli. So nothing new in terms of story. Failed the Bechtel - not surprising, I guess, considering the context. A woman is featured at one stage, desperately trying to keep a baby alive. That particular scene reminded me of a scene in Apocalypse Now (the Directors Cut), which this film was also somewhat reminiscent of, but in general women were mothers, wives, sisters and girlfriends at home, despite the fact that women nursed in the front line in WW1 (Testament of Youth), and were certainly active in WW2 at least as spies and resistance.

I enjoyed this film for its window into history, and family history at that, and for its strong narrative and beautiful filming. Worth a watch.

***

Cecil says:  I saw it on the same weekend as Bea but on the other side of the world, at the Classic Theatre, Elsternwick, in Melbourne’s leafy suburbs.

1917 tells a great story even if I think we focus too much on Tommy experience in WW1 or Churchill/Dunkirk etc in WW2.

The story is told as if with the two characters involved. It's a 'running' mission to get a message to the front line in time to stop a disastrous attack. And unlike Bea, I actually felt like the long takes helped me feel a part of the experience; much more immersed in 'real time' speed of events than in the modern-day social media style video clips which assume a minute attention span, and so zip from scene to scene in a milli-second, leaving old brains like mine still thinking of the action three scenes ago, while the camera has jumped on and taken more youthful brains with it.

As the intrepid pair set off from the trenches and wade through dead bodies, it conjures up images I am lucky enough only to have read before in the fantastic Pat Barker trilogy; and the scenes in the bombed-out town as our hero dodges flares and enemy gunfire; or the camera work in the water as he leaps into the fast-flowing river. It's all really well filmed and I felt a part of the process as it happened.

Apparently the River Clyde comes into it, though god knows where or when - surely it’s the Clyde upstream somewhere near Lanark rather than the wide shipping channel I’m used to seeing near Glasgow...

The final running scene reminded me of Mel Gibson in Gallipoli, so there I did share Bea’s perception, and you realise how awful it must have been to have been a fast sprinter in those war years - you’d get to do all the life threatening jobs that needed speed above all.

I found the scenes with the French/Belgian mother and baby in the bombed-out house very moving, but actually as Bea says, this is a total Bechtel failure overall, as she was the only female appearance in the whole film.

Finally, as usual I was one of the few diehards who stayed for the full credits at the end. I was amazed how many plasterers and carpenters they employed and how many digital artists (mostly with Indian names) appear listed. I do sometimes think they overdo who gets ‘credited’ these days (‘Sheryl Smith brought the tea to the cast and film crew on Day 26 of filming...’), but there is usually something to learn or to note from staying in to watch them all roll through.

***.5

The Promise

Seen at the Roxy Cinema in Nowra, NSW

Cecil says: Another film set in one of the world wars, but for once this one tells the story from an angle we do not often hear about in the west: this was all to do with the massacre of Armenians in Turkey in WW1 (and I enjoyed it almost as much as I'd enjoyed Flamme & Citron which looked at WW2 from the perspective of Denmark).

This film had so many aspects worth talking about that it took us virtually our whole half hour drive home to talk through our impressions.

So the plot basically revolves around an Armenian man living in a Turkish village who wants to become a doctor. To raise the money for medical school in Constantinople, he gets betrothed to a young lass in his village and then goes off for two years study with the dowry.

In the meantime, war breaks out, he falls in love with another woman in Constantinople and life changes completely. I'll say no more so as not to spoil for those who haven't seen the film yet, but there are many twists and turns in this epic film that lasts more than two hours and ends in modern-day America with some of the survivors reflecting back on those earlier times.

It was fabulous for us to trigger memories of places visited on our long overland journey from Yorkshire to Australia: there was Istanbul, of course, with its markets and tea rooms, its bustle and beauty, but also its reminder of just how close to the surface oppression is in that city (the prison guards reminded me of those in American Express, and who's to say they aren't still the same today as Pride marchers were arrested on the streets of Istanbul on the same day as when we saw the film in the safety of Nowra); there were memories of Baku and its dimly-lit tea houses and narrow lanes.

And it reminded us of how the people we met in Azerbaijan - in a town close to the Iranian border - had not been keen for us to visit the local memorial for the Armenian genocide.

What was interesting was to learn that the massacres of Armenians began already in 1915 (the few of us who did know about the genocide, think of it as being 1918). It was also moving to see the forced labour made to build a railway in Turkey - Hollywood has made everyone in the English-speaking world aware of the Bridge over the River Kwai  in Thailand, but how many more such projects were forced on POWs in other parts of the world? Probably a lot more than we realise.

Having just seen Their Finest, where propaganda film-makers in WW2 are forced to find a role for an American to broaden the film's appeal, we couldn't help wondering if this was a real life version of the same...

I was tempted to whisper to Bea half way through this film to ask: What was the name of the film? I had genuinely forgotten. But The Promise (presumably by budding doctor to young village girl) began to feel like such a small part of the plot as the film developed. Was there an original version of this screenplay without the love triangle involving the American journalist? He plays a more and more important role as the story progresses and he becomes more and more a hero (very like the American they invent in Their Finest). And the scene where the US Ambassador stands up to the Turkish Interior Ministry felt almost Trumpian in its 'America First' way.

Some of the casting was slightly odd, too. Charlotte Le Bon is good as the new love interest, but she hardly looks like a village Armenian, and we both thought when she first appeared that she was some sort of American governess to the rich man's kids.

Then there's the daughter of same rich man who is delightful but looks so mixed race that when she first appeared, I assumed the rich Armenian had married a black woman, and that confused me for a while as no black woman ever appeared through the film.

For all that, The Promise  is a fabulous film and I'm so glad we chose it over the other option for early Sunday morning, which would have been Churchill. 

****

Bea says: This is a film in the style of the great epics; it put me in mind of Dr Zhivago – the backdrop of war changing the lives of the young people forever; a complicated love triangle; and some lovely shots of the landscape.  Whether it actually quite makes epic status itself is a questionable; it certainly tries but perhaps just falls a little short.

Cecil has summarised the story above, and like him I certainly enjoyed seeing the locations and landscapes that we personally had travelled through and learning about a historical incident I knew little about; as opposed to the more often told stories of the Great War (the trenches, Gallipoli, etc.). 

Its “epicness” worked in that it totally transported me to the place and era, and I was completely caught up in the story, action and characters – a thoroughly enjoyable experience for a Sunday morning matinee.  I really cared about what happened, and the characters developed over time. 

What didn’t work was (and I echo Cecil here) some of the casting (Charlotte Le Bon just doesn’t look like she came from an Armenian village…) and the title didn’t feel at all like the focus of the film. 

Chatting to Cecil on the way home we thought if anything it was more about standing by one’s convictions rather than keeping to a promise; either the plot developed as the film was made, or it was a translation from Armenian that didn’t quite work, or it was two film stories that were merged, which it occasionally felt like to me.  I also wondered if they had tried out a couple of endings, as (spoiler alert) the death of Charlotte Le Bon’s character Anna felt rather….convenient, if sad.  That scene was also a bit derivative – Titanic, The Piano, and it broke my involvement in the story as I thought how similar the scene was to those films’ scenes.

On another note, it was interesting to hear Chris Cornell’s song of the same name while the credits rolled, and Christian Bale was excellent thoughout this film and the standout actor for me.

Definitely worth a watch, a particularly good Sunday film if you want to escape for a while.

***1/2