The nostalgic, autobiographically inspired sequel to Hope and Glory is everything you’d expect from distinctive film-maker John Boorman: a heartfelt story told in arresting visual tones through a melange of conflicting accents and strangely theatrical staging. The date is 1952. Bill Rohan (Callum Turner), who once took such childish pleasure in his school being bombed, is now doing national service alongside Percy Hapgood, a rebel whose firebrand British temperament is ill served by American actor Caleb Landry Jones’s blood-vessel-busting whine.
Bill has issues of his own (predominantly an obsession with Tamsin Egerton’s suicidal toff) but it’s his decency of character that shines through as the country comes to terms with the madness of the Korean war and the dawning of a new Elizabethan age. There’s no doubting the sincerity of Boorman’s rites-of-passage endeavour; anyone who can face the final image of a camera on the banks of the Thames without a tear in their eye is made of sterner stuff than I. The director has called this film “my last” and if it is then I wish I liked it more. No matter – throughout his career Boorman always turned flaws into signature strengths, a personal vision with which this is very much in step.
