It was a classic year at this year’s BFI London Film Festival, which took place earlier this month. If there was any observable shift, it was the number of filmmakers who turned to smaller-scale dramas of human connection, with action, fantasy and, to some degree, politics less prominent than usual.
Even the big releases seemed to turn inwards. The opening night gala marked a break with precedent by not showcasing a major British release. Instead there was a screening of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the third in the Benoit Blanc comedy detective series, hailed as a return to form after the rather grandiose Glass Onion.
The films that really excelled at this year’s festival succeeded in taking apparently small subjects and revealing the depths within. Blue Moon is set in the theatre bar on the opening night of Oklahoma!, the first collaboration between legendary partnership Rodgers and Hammerstein. Rodgers’ previous writing partner, Lorenz Hart, sits there drowning his sorrows, regaling fellow bar patrons with tales of showbiz glamour and trying to hold onto his fading hopes.
Directed by Richard Linklater, it’s a tour-de-force by Ethan Hawke as Hart, by turns amused, melancholy and sardonic in his take on the power of entertainment to brighten and conceal the disappointments of life.
Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet adapts Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about the son who died prior to Shakespeare writing Hamlet. It is a two-hander between Paul Mescal as Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as his wife Agnes as they become estranged by personal tragedy and Shakespeare’s pursuit of the London stage.
In an astonishing closing sequence, Agnes travels to London to see the play her husband abandoned her for, its poetic questioning of the meaning of a life lived under the shadow of grief transcending the division between author and stage, imitation and life.
Loss seemed to be the theme of the festival, and the power of art to provide not only an expression of loss but an imaginative trace of a past that cannot, however, be relived. Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound follows two musicologists (Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor) over one winter as they collect the folk music of rural America and develop a more intimate bond. Their eventual separation makes the film a document of the loss of both an older way of life and a brief moment of human connection.
Pablo Trapero’s & Sons features a famous but reclusive author who invites his two estranged sons to his mansion to ask them to look after their half-brother after he dies. But there’s a twist that makes the two brothers wonder if they have ended up in the plot of one of their father’s novels.
Even Paolo Sorrentino, a director prone to gaudy exuberance, turned to introspection with La Grazia. Toni Servillo plays a fictional Italian president reflecting on the decisions that await in his final months of service, while mourning the loss of his beloved wife and trying to maintain his connection with his daughter.
James Sweeney’s Twinless was the standout comedy of the festival, a laugh-out-loud film that could probably best be described as a buddy movie, about two men who meet in a support group for twins whose siblings have died.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You starts off as a fairly gentle account of the stresses of motherhood. But the escalating anxiety and absurdity end up making this a white-knuckle ride, centred on an Oscar-worthy performance from Rose Byrne. There’s also a nicely sardonic supporting role from Conan O’Brien as her exasperated therapist.
Still on the theme of children, Train Dreams features an impressive Joel Edgerton as a logger who spends his life waiting for the return of his lost wife and child, secluded from the passage of the decades amid the grandeur of the American pine forests.
Personal and political
Where films took a more overt political stance, they were again more likely to zero in on the intimate rather than the epic. The Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who has faced state repression for his social criticism, presented It Was Just an Accident. This stunning work follows a man who thinks he might have found the torturer who tormented him in prison. The film ultimately poses the question of how one can live not during, but after, atrocity.
Coming very much from the midst of atrocity, The Voice of Hind Rajab features the real audio recordings of a six-year-old girl who called the Red Crescent emergency line in Gaza. She is the only survivor in a car full of her dead relatives, and her rescue would only take eight minutes, but the route has to be agreed first with the Israeli Defence Forces. The hours of waiting that ensue become an utterly devastating account of the reality of occupation.
In another break with precedent, a documentary, Lucrecia Martel’s Landmarks, about the murdered indigenous activist Javier Chocobar, won the official festival competition. Combining documentary footage with Orwell’s writing, Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5 is a compelling documentary examination of propaganda and power.
A number of films missed the mark in my view. Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly has a great cast (George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup) but not much else to recommend it. Edward Berger’s follow up to Conclave, Ballad Of A Small Player, lacks the dramatic focus of his earlier film.
The biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, Daniel Day-Lewis’s return to the cinema in his son Ronan Day-Lewis’s Anemone, and Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, Chronology of Water, all failed to live up to their promise.
Whether the turn towards more intimate dramas is a sign of a larger trend remains to be seen. But this year, the misses were greatly outnumbered by the hits, and there will be plenty of films to enjoy in the coming year.
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Louis Bayman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
