Joanna Scanlan in After Love
(Picture: film handout)At last night’s Baftas, one of the best films of the year won absolutely nothing. Voters spurned Maggie Gyllenhaal’s consistently electrifying The Lost Daughter. Shame on them.
I’m also sad Lady Gaga’s glorious performance in House of Gucci got her nowhere fast.
But what a night for Joanna Scanlan. No one who’s seen gently provocative indie drama After Love, could begrudge the 60 year old Welsh actress her big moment. She’s both ferocious and under-stated as a widow and Muslim convert, Mary Hussain, who discovers her husband was leading a double life. After Love is full of moving words, but even more moving silences. Scanlan, in one scene, looks into the mirror and treats her wide-eyed reflection as if it were the most mesmerising of co-stars. It’s magical stuff.
Wins for Lashana Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson and deaf actor Troy Kotsur (the earthy dad in ground-breaking family comedy, CODA) were also deserved.
In terms of the other major awards, “surprising” is not the word that springs to mind. Most went to exactly the same films that did well at the Golden Globes. Which is fine by me. Adulation for Belfast, Drive My Car and Ariana DeBose? Yep, bring it on.
The big talking point, of course, is the fact that, as in 2021, a woman has snagged Bafta’s two top prizes. Just as Chloe Zhao won Best Picture and Best Director for Nomadland, Jane Campion has pulled off the double-whammy with her alt-Western, The Power of the Dog. Like Zhao, Campion had never won Baftas in these categories before. On so many levels, it’s a triumph for diversity.
Actor Sam Elliott recently took issue with Campion’s vision of the West, but Bafta members were rightly intrigued by the battle between rancher, Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) and “mummy’s boy” Peter Gordon (Kodi Smit-McPhee), two bruised males struggling to survive in heteronormative Montana. I’ve yet to meet a Brit who doesn’t feel the same way.
But let’s go back to a moment, in Campion’s career, when she wasn’t so in sync with the film industry or the public.
In 1999, producer Harvey Weinstein, who’d championed Campion’s The Piano, was King of the awards season (his profoundly mediocre comedy, Shakespeare in Love, won Best Picture at both the Baftas and the Oscars). And Campion was getting an earful, from him, about her black dramedy, Holy Smoke! He apparently told her, in a rage, that it was a bad film. In that it was roundly ignored at the Baftas and Oscars - and failed to set the box office alight - a part of her may have wondered if he was right.
He was top dog; she was under the cosh. Two decades later, he’s serving a 23 year jail sentence and Campion’s being lauded as never before.
Like Peter, The Power of the Dog’s hero, Campion doesn’t go in for big shows of strength. She doesn’t do blazing guns. She’s played the long game and (excuse me while I cry happy tears) she’s won. That said, with the Oscars in two weeks, it’s no time to get cocky. So let us pray... In the name of the mother and the son and the holy smoke, may Jane now conquer Hollywood. Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. Wouldn’t that be a perfect way for this modern fairytale to end?
