British documentary and ad director Oscar Hudson makes his feature debut in the Venice critics week sidebar with this high-concept anti-war satire, a through-the-looking-glass absurdist nightmare about realising that the otherness of your enemy is an illusion. There are some bold and ambitious images here, and some interesting split-screen work. Maybe there’s an issue about the style and substance ratio and perhaps the running time is indulgent, but this is a strong piece of work.
Twins Elliott and Luke Tittensor play two soldiers of equal rank in opposing armies, called Pte Warne and Pte Arthur. They represent two nations of fictional Ruritanian weirdness, formerly at war but who have evidently concluded a tensely unstable peace treaty. Warne has a resplendent white uniform and, like the rest of his country, shaves his head, while Arthur has shaggy hair and a looser uniform. These two men have been chosen by their respective countries to be the sole guards at the border in the middle of a vast and featureless desert. They face off every day, notionally co-operating and sharing a station straddling the border, but suspicious, carrying out their various patriotic rituals to reassert their identity.
It could be that Hudson was inspired by the elaborate Attari-Wagah border ceremony of India and Pakistan, a military ballet of mutual resentment that has recently become more acrimonious because of the issue of who gets to have the bigger flag. The peace process means that these two border guards must carry out their daily ceremonies with no one else to witness them, their commanding officers and civilian populations being many miles away. They are supplied with food and a large amount of live pigeons, a handful of which have to be released every day to symbolise peace.
But when Arthur presumes to release a daily pigeon-batch on his own – they’re supposed to do it jointly – and moreover messes with the boiled eggs that Warne is cooking for his supper, relations between them become strained. They are in existential confrontation in the burning sun, they lose their bearings and a sense of what side of the border they’re on, and they are furthermore traumatised by the appearance of an Indigenous shepherd (played by Neil Maskell). He shows up like Pozzo without Lucky in Beckett’s Godot and the result of this encounter tips them into mutual breakdown. Which of them is which? They do, after all, have a great deal in common: chiefly an overbearing military father figure whose memory haunts each man.
This is a boisterous, lively picture: I can imagine Richard Lester having directed it in 1968. Hudson will certainly have more to show us.
• Straight Circle screened at the Venice film festival.
