The most rewarding film-watching experiences I had this year were at the BFI Southbank, which put on a complete Satyajit Ray retrospective to commemorate, belatededly, Ray’s centenary, along with a screening of the films of the marvellous actress (and until recent, Labour MP) Glenda Jackson. All the Ray classics held up marvellously – the Apu trilogy (1955–59), Charulata (1964), The Music Room (1958), The Big City (1963), and (my favourite) Days and Nights in the Forest (1970). It was good to watch some lesser works – The Home and the World (1984), The Stranger (1991) – on the big screen, and to discover that I’d been quite wrong to regard as minor works the two less feted films I hadn’t seen before: The Adversary (1970) and The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha (1968). The latter, a sort of pacifist musical parable for children, was a pure delight from start to finish, and the former, about the travails of an unemployed graduate in 1960s Calcutta, turned out to have a good deal more to offer than the relatively well-known interview scene at the start.
The highlights of the Glenda Jackson retrospective were the two Ken Russell adaptations of D. H. Lawrence novels. Women in Love (1969) was the real highlight, but there were some very fine moments in The Rainbow (1989) too. And Jackson herself is a towering figure – how I should have loved to see her on stage in her prime.
Of the films released this year, I was most impressed and moved by Aftersun (trailer)– about a young father, played by Paul Mescal, taking his twelve-year-old daughter to a holiday camp in Turkey at some point in the 1990s. Something is off about the father, but seeing him, as we do, only fragmentarily, from grainy camcorder footage and the equally partial memories of his now grown-up daughter looking back on that holiday, it takes us a while to work out what. It’s the kind of film worth watching in a cinema, and more than once.
I didn’t expect Kazuo Ishiguro’s transplant of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Ikiru – about a dying bureaucrat finding a sudden burst of energy – to 1950s London to work at all. It was a rare instance of a film that evokes its setting with language rather than costume and (more annoyingly) endless shots of people smoking indoors. I am especially sensitive to linguistic anachronisms in anything set in this period – the subject of much of my academic work – but didn’t spot one. Even the one clichéd note – the use of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis – felt fully earned.
A quite different film also set in 1950s London was See How They Run, a stagey murder mystery in what’s called the ‘classic’ style set during the early years of the theatrical run of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. The tone is self-consciously silly, and there is at least one blatant anachronism (the term ‘serial killer’ wasn’t coined until the 70s), but the film has marvellous comic performances from Saoirse Ronan and Harris Dickinson, the latter really showing his range over the last couple of years with great turns as part of ensembles in Joanna Hogg’s wonderful The Souvenir II (2021) and the otherwise overacted Triangle of Sadness (the trailer contains pretty much all the good bits).
I particularly enjoyed Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War, about the short life, and war art, of an unjustly patronised artist. I’ve seen quite a lot of his paintings over the years – there was an exhibition of his work at the Dulwich Gallery in 2015, and a good collection of his designs at the Fry Gallery in Saffron Walden, which I often visited when I lived in nearby Cambridge. The documentary effectively brings out the respects in which he was a pioneer, the excitement of his artistic circle (who lived and worked in the Essex village of Great Bardfield and are thoroughly chronicled in this book and this one), and how far removed he was from the twee stereotype of mid-century British art.
Benediction, Terence Davies’s film about the life and griefs of Siegfried Sassoon, is much better written than most films of the kind – with each passing year, screenwriters seem less and less able to produce plausible period dialogue. The odd mix of styles, and the inspired casting of Peter Capaldi as the crotchety old Sassoon, help to rescue it from the usual clichés of the prestige (but mediocre) British literary biopic; few people have been spared – Sylvia Plath, Iris Murdoch, Christopher Isherwood. It really belongs with such forgotten but inspired BBC films as We Think the World of You (available to view on YouTube), about the life of J. R. Ackerley – if that sort of film had been given a generous budget. I saw it at the London Film Festival last year, and am pleased to see it’s now on Netflix in the UK.
Another film, from 2020, that I discovered recently on Netflix, is Yeh Ballet, about two boys living in poverty in Bombay, discovering (their talents for) ballet. I’d bet a fair amount of money that it was pitched to producers as ‘Slumdog Millionaire meets Billy Elliot’. It helps a lot than one of the actors, Manish Chauhan, plays his younger self – and proves himself as actor as well as dancer. It hits all the clichés, I suppose, but the writing is sharp and accurate, and really knows how to represent the full multilingual reality the film’s characters inhabit (as Slumdog most certainly did not).
Watching the film had me seek out a marvellous essay comparing Billy Elliot (2000) to Ken Loach’s Kes (1969) that I read fifteen years ago, in a copy of the Socialist Worker I picked up off a pavement in central Oxford some time in my first week in England. The byline had an Indian name, but I cannot, to my lasting frustration remember what it was. In any case, some clever Googling has let me to the text, on an anonymous blog (if you know the author’s identity, do please let me know). It’s the kind of subtle, undoctrinaire Marxist criticism one rarely reads now even in the New Left Review.
Billy in Kes reminds those of us who value the rights and hopes of labour that the world of the worker is not pretty or fair or kind, that it is also a world where the weak, marginalized and dissident get screwed over and are thrust into unwanted lives and roles. Billy in Billy Elliot reminds us that a miner’s son can live his dream, and if doing so means copping out of a worker’s existence, it also means work, it also means pain, and it can produce beauty. The final moments of the film can move one to tears. The father, now older and weaker, stumbles through London – an unfamiliar, dizzying world to one who’s never left Durham in his life. Bemused by it all, dragged on by an impatient elder son, he stumbles to an aisle seat at the ballet, and his old head nods and his old eyes shine with tears and rapture as, on stage, his son explodes into music, motion and magic. Kes offers us a vocabulary of grim realism, Billy Elliot one of redemptive fantasy. Both films are recognizably enough made from the Left, though in different registers. Both films challenge some of the Left’s holy cows. That is reason enough to value them both.