Tag: British Films

Walkabout (1971)

The blistering heat of the Australian wilderness is the setting for Roeg’s profound and troubling film

Director: Nicolas Roeg

Cast: Jenny Agutter (White girl), Luc Roeg (Brother), David Gulpilil (Aboriginal boy), John Mellion (Father)

Some films are hard to read. Others delve gently into ideas so complex and obscure that they need patient attention to follow. And other films are so elliptical and enigmatic they almost defy understanding. Walkabout is such a film. What is it about? You could almost say “everything and nothing”.

The surface story is strikingly simple. A 17-year-old girl (Jenny Agutter) and her much younger brother (Luc Roeg, the director’s son) are stranded in the Australian outback after their disturbed father first attempts to kill them (perhaps?) and then sets their car on fire and shoots himself. Quickly lost, with no idea how to get back to civilisation, they meet a young Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) on Walkabout. He saves them and agrees to guide them back to civilisation (perhaps?). But how far can cultural understanding go?

The story Roeg is telling underneath this bare-bones plot, though, is intriguing and troubling. Roeg uses the setting to explore the complex interrelationship between Western civilisation and the native civilisations it has displaced in many parts of the world. It’s also about ageing, sexual awakenings and the barriers (some of which we place ourselves) that prevent communication. This is all set in Roeg’s stunningly photographed, dreamlike representation of the Australian outback which is part surreal combination of cross-cuts and editing, part dark nature documentary.

It’s a haunting film where it’s never clear exactly what is happening, or what each of the characters is aiming to do ( “I don’t know” is a common refrain heard in the film). From the start, there is clearly something wrong with the Father in some way (with dark suggestions that he has too great an interest in his daughter’s burgeoning sexuality), but why does he turn partly homicidal (he puts little effort into pursuing his children) and then suicidal? The film gives no real clue.

This confusion about motives continues through the film. Does the Aboriginal boy really understand (or intend) the need to deliver the siblings back to civilisation? At one point he walks up a hill, is talked at by a white woman from a nearby settlement, then returns giving no indication he has discovered what they are searching for. Later he does the same after finding a road. Does he want to help? Or is he unwilling to let go of the spiritual closeness he can feel between the three of them?

Similarly, Agutter’s character undergoes a spiritual experience so profound, and yet so unsettling to her carefully conventional upbringing, she seems unable to process it. In the company of the Aboriginal boy we see her begin to relax and lose some of her carefully guarded inhibitions (this culminates in a famous naked swimming scene, which got the film in plenty of trouble in 2003 when the Age of Consent was raised to 18). But at the same time, she is never really able to communicate with the Aboriginal boy.

Her attempts to do so are almost laughably incompetent. While her younger brother develops a natural rapport using sign language, she is hopelessly wedded to verbal communication (she doesn’t even think to mime drinking when asking for water). In the outback, she clings far longer than the boy does to the accoutrements of civilisation in clothing and their radio. While she does relax, only at rare moments do we feel her humbled by the land around her. Their first moments together can be seen in the video.

Only for the briefest of brief moments, in an abandoned hut, do they meet briefly as equals – a silent moment of eyes meeting and a brief understanding of shared affection. It is shattered by her complete rejection shortly afterwards of the Aboriginal boy’s courtship dance – scared and confused (as much by her own obvious interest earlier), she pointedly ignores the dance, leaving the boy outside all night. The next day she and her brother are dressed in their school uniforms, as if nothing has happened.

Roeg’s final nihilistic observations – we may at points come closer together as a species, but we will only rarely ever be able to overcome the barriers we have created between ourselves. We may develop an immediate bond with people in extreme circumstances, but the closer we get to “normality” the quicker we reject those bonds and revert back to our ingrained behaviours.

This is all fascinating and deeply engrossing stuff – and it’s the sort of material you can reflect on over and over again. Roeg mixes this in with plenty of dark comparisons between our soulless modern world and the “savage” world of the Aboriginals – a comparison never flattering to the modern world. Roeg uses intercutting to point these up, particularly between the hunting of the Aboriginal boy, his respectful killing of a kangaroo, and our own mechanical slaughter and processing of meat. Now to be honest these sort of cutbacks are thuddingly dated and heavy-handed – the sort of holier-than-thou opinion making that quickly gets on the nerves.

A few of these sequences do work well. Near the end, the Aboriginal boy hunts when he is nearly crushed by a truck carrying two modern hunters. The truck skids to a halt and the hunters gun down several animals (the rather tiresome editing uses a series of still shots, crash zooms and distorted sounds) while the Aborigine looks on with confusion and disdain. In another sequence, the white woman the Aborigine met heads back to a settlement, where white men seem to be exploiting Aboriginal labour. She sits sadly on the bed staring into the distance. Moments like this, despite the often dated editorial tricks, do carry a real sense of the divide between two cultures.

Other sections of the film make similar points about the wildness of both the outback and the city world, but with increasingly dated and tired visual tricks – do we really need an umpteenth shot of maggots eating a corpse? Or more quiet pans along cold 1970s commercial surfaces? This is a shame, as the photography is beautiful. Roeg has an eye for a brilliant image – his shots of the Australian outback are some of the best use of sun and desert on film since Lawrence of Arabia. The film’s shots of the desert are simply stunning, with Roeg’s hypnotic series of images guaranteed to not only haunt your mind, but also to show an angle on the world you won’t have seen before.

Walkabout may be slightly dated in some of its production and editing techniques, but it’s a deeply thoughtful, unsettling work that asks profound and difficult questions about civilisation, life and death – the sort of film that rewards revisiting and reinterpretation. While many parts of it clunk in places, or have a distinct 1970s flashiness in their filmmaking, when it moves away from these rather clumsy ideas to deal with concepts that are more spiritual and intriguing, it’s a fascinating film.

In Which We Serve (1942)

Noel Coward takes command in stirring British wartime drama In Which We Serve

Director: Noël Coward, David Lean

Cast: Noël Coward (Captain E.V. Kinross), Bernard Miles (CPO Walter Hardy), John Mills (Shorty Blake), Celia Johnson (Alix Kinross), Joyce Carey (Kath Hardy), Kay Walsh (Freda Lewis), Michael Wilding (Flags), Leslie Dwyer (Parkinson), James Donald (Doc), Philip Friend (Torps), Frederick Piper (Edgecombe), Richard Attenborough (Young Stoker)

Only the British would make a wartime propaganda film about a sunk ship where over half the crew gets killed (the Navy nicknamed the film In Which We Sink). It says something about this endearingly muddle-headed country that the stories that appeal most to us are those that celebrate our struggles against adversity. It was filmed in the aftermath of the Battle of Britain but before the Battle of El Alamein – the British considered themselves safe from invasion, but still saw victory was a long way off. In that climate, the film’s attitude of knuckling down and doing your duty to achieve a distant dream must have resounded profoundly with millions of people.

Based on the early war career of Louis Mountbatten, this “story of a ship” revolves around the Torin, a destroyer captained by E.V Kinross (Noël Coward). The ship is dive bombed and sunk by the Luftwaffe, and the captain and survivors cling to a lifeboat, waiting for rescue. While they wait, the crew remember their lives back home in flashback – in particular the captain, CPO Hardy (Bernard Miles), and able seaman ‘Shorty’ Blake (John Mills). Can you imagine an American propaganda film with a plot like that?

It’s easy to mock a film like In Which We Serve today. Its stiff-upper-lipped, duty-led, hierarchical world has been lampooned countless times since Peter Cook’s pitch-perfect Bernard Miles impersonation in Beyond the Fringe. (Early in the film, watching Kinross at home, I remembered Eddie Izzard’s spoof: “Don’t go to the war Daddy / I must they won’t start without me…”). The first 30 minutes, with its clipped dialogue, fast-paced delivery and stiff-backed, formal playing style takes a while to tune into. But it’s worth it, as the establishment of this carefully controlled exterior is what makes the later sections, with strong emotions just below the surface, so moving.

Coward was of course primarily a man of the theatre, and this was his only original film script. His collaboration with experienced film-makers produced a stirring, skilfully crafted epic that reflects on several levels of British rank and society, and not only shows us “why we fight” but also “why we should fight”. Coward is credited as the principal director, but much of the direction (and the film’s skilfully constructed structure in the editing suite) comes from his co-director David Lean, here making his directing debut.

Lean’s expressive hand is clear in the brilliantly composed sequences on board the ship itself, both in action and at ease. An example of the fluid editing, is where the camera follows the progression of a missile through the ship, passed from crew member to crew member, each given some brief moments to show their quiet determination and resolve. Similarly, the sequences on the drifting lifeboat have a claustrophobic intensity about them. The flashbacks are carefully placed to allow our understanding of the characters and their backgrounds to grow each time.

The scenes back home are remarkable for their dramatic simplicity. Coward understood the stories that move are those of normal people. The sailors’ home lives – from the captain down – are domestic, calm, happy and above all normal. Very little happens: one sailor gets married, the captain plays with his children, the Petty Officer teases his wife. This regularity makes their courage under fire all the more stirring: truly ordinary people doing the extraordinary. Some critics have called Coward’s attitude to the working classes snobbish, but there is no disdain at all here – instead there’s a paternal admiration with genuine warmth.

This warmth extends even to a stoker who cuts and runs during action. It would be easy to use this moment to amplify the braveness of the others. Instead, in a moving speech to the men, the captain takes the blame onto himself for not supporting the young man earlier. The mortified stoker, in a wonderful little scene, struggles to express his shame to a barmaid, not in anger but in a quiet, confused guilt. The film never condemns or judges him – he is quietly shown returning to his duties. There is no explicit moment of redemption, just a sense of a man who has let himself down, resolving quietly to do better.

The opening sequence covers the lifespan of the ship – from its construction and commissioning, to its launch, early actions and sinking, with the implication of a nation coming together. Later scenes mix theatrical touches with documentary realism. A marvellous sequence covers Dunkirk, which feels incredibly real but also showcases a few wonderful flourishes, from Kinross’ speech praising the soldiers’ bravery to Shorty’s affectionately wry remark on the rivalry between soldiers and sailors. The final sequence brings us full circle, with the construction and launch of another battleship under Kinross’ command. We may lose a battle, but we are never beaten.

Coward takes on the lead role. To be honest, it’s a striking piece of miscasting that somehow works out – Noël Coward is no-one’s idea of a hard-nosed naval veteran. He lacks the range in particular for his scenes of domestic life, coming across as too detached and distant – particularly noticeable since his wife is played brilliantly by the radiant Celia Johnson, conveying layers of emotion under a controlled exterior. But, his quiet, buttoned-up professionalism and clipped Englishness work perfectly for the quietly emotional speeches he delivers. These he nails perfectly, his voice just giving the hint of cracking. It’s a curiously stagy, and in no way naturalistic, performance – but as a representation of a particular type of Britishness it’s perfect.

And Kinross is just the sort of man you would follow to the end – distant and authoritarian, but just and warm. Rescued from the ocean, he goes immediately to his men, moving quietly from wounded man to wounded man, collecting addresses, issuing quiet words of unexpressive comfort (“I’ll tell her you did your duty”). His closing speech (heavily based on Mountbatten’s own address to his crew) throbs with emotion just below the surface as he thanks his men – and it’s hard not to feel it as he shakes the hand of each man and is overcome with emotion, he can only nod a brief acknowledgement to his officers. Lean trains the camera on his back, as we see his shoulders seem to swell to support the pride, respect and love for his men. It’s peculiarly British, but this unspoken affection is hugely powerful.

The more naturalistic performances from the rest of the cast help to anchor the film – and also allow Coward’s more stylised acting to work effectively. John Mills is wonderful as Gunner “Shorty” Blake, a plucky, kind and witty man. He’s just the sort of unexpressive hero we’d all like to be, and his homespun love story with Kay Walsh is genuinely engaging and moving for its everyday normality. Mills also carries much of the film’s humour.

It’s the final sections of the film that really, really work. I can’t get through the scenes of the surviving crew being saved, the quiet courage of the dying men and the austere warmth of the captain, the speeches that burst with pride and respect under a reserved veneer, without feeling a lump in the throat. It’s a masterful piece of quietly powerful film-making, that pays off precisely because so much of what has gone before has been so normal. The fact that we’ve seen the lives of these people – and can see what, in their quiet way, they are fighting for – I found increasingly moving.

In Which We Serve is a wonderful piece of film-making, very well written by Coward and strongly directed (largely) by Lean. Coward himself, in the lead role, is far better at the speeches than as either a captain or husband, but the rest of the cast is excellent with Mills and Johnson both outstanding. It’s truly the stuff of spoofery in many ways today, but tune yourself up to the accents and the repressed Britishness and this is a heartfelt and deeply moving film. Perhaps one of the finest propaganda films you’ll ever see – and still so very British.

The Iron Lady (2011)

Meryl Streep impersonates the Iron Lady to excellent effect in this otherwise bland and forgettable, compromised mess of a picture

Director: Phyllida Lloyd

Cast: Meryl Streep (Margaret Thatcher), Jim Broadbent (Denis Thatcher), Olivia Colman (Carol Thatcher), Roger Allam (Gordon Reece), Nicholas Farrell (Airey Neave), Iain Glen (Alfred Roberts), Richard E. Grant (Michael Heseltine), Anthony Head (Sir Geoffrey Howe), Harry Lloyd (Young Denis Thatcher), Michael Pennington (Michael Foot), Alexandra Roach (Young Margaret Thatcher), John Sessions (Edward Heath)

In British politics has there been a figure as controversial as Margaret Thatcher? A domineering Prime Minister who reshaped the country (for better or worse depending on who you speak to), crafting a legacy in the UK’s politics, economy and society that we will continue to feel for the foreseeable future, she’s possibly one of the most important figures in our history. It’s a life rich for a proper biographical treatment; instead, it gets this film.

The film’s framing device is focused on the ageing Thatcher (Meryl Streep), now dealing with onset dementia and having detailed conversations with her deceased husband Denis (Jim Broadbent). Cared for by her daughter Carol (Olivia Colman), she reflects on her political career and the sacrifices she made personally to achieve these. Woven in and out of this are Thatcher’s increasingly disjointed memories of her political career.

The most surprising thing about this film is how little it actually wants to engage with Thatcherism itself. Perhaps aware that (certainly in the UK) Thatcher remains an incredibly divisive figure, the film’s focus is actually her own struggles with grief and approaching dementia. Her career as PM is relegated to a series of flashbacks and short scenes, which fill probably little more than 20-30 minutes of the runtime, shot and spliced together as a mixture of deliberately subjective memories and fevered half-dreams. Can you imagine a film about Thatcher where Arthur Scargill and the miners’ strike doesn’t merit a mention? You don’t need to: thanks to The Iron Lady it now exists.

Perhaps Thatcher’s politics were considered to “unlikeable” – certainly, one imagines, by its writer and director – to be something to craft a film around, so it was thought better to brush them gently under the table. Instead the focus is to make Thatcher as sympathetic as possible to a viewer who didn’t share her politics, by concentrating on her struggles against sexism in the 1950s and her struggles with age late on. Why not accept what Thatcher stood for and make a film (for better or worse) about that? Perhaps more material on her actual achievements in office were shot and cut (the film does have a very short run time and underuses its ace supporting cast), but the whole film feels fatally compromised – which is more than a little ironic since it is about a woman famous for her lack of compromise.

In fact it’s rather hard to escape the view that Roger Ebert put forward: “few people were neutral in their feelings about [Thatcher], except the makers of this picture”. It’s a film with no real interest in either politics or history, the two things that defined Thatcher’s entire life. And as if to flag up the mediocre nature of the material they’ve chosen, it’s then interspersed with too-brief cuts to more interesting episodes from Thatcher’s life than those we are watching. Only when the older Thatcher hosts a dinner party and launches into a blistering sudden condemnation of Al-Qaeda and support of military action against terrorism (followed by her casual disregard of a hero-worshipping acolyte) do we ever get a sense of finding out something about her, or of seeing her personality brought to life.

The film’s saving grace is of course Meryl Streep’s terrific impersonation of Thatcher. I call it impersonation as the film so strenuously avoids delving into the events and opinions that shaped Thatcher that Streep gets very little opportunity to really develop a character we can understand, or to present an insight into her. Her performance as the older Thatcher – losing control of her mannerisms, deteriorating over the course of the film – is impressive in its technical accomplishment, but that’s largely what it remains. As the film doesn’t allow us to really know Thatcher, and doesn’t work with what defines her, it largely fails to move us when we see her weak and alone. So for all the accomplishment of Streep’s work, I couldn’t say this was a truly great performance – certainly of no comparison to, say, Day-Lewis as Lincoln or Robert Hardy as Churchill. I’d even say Andrea Riseborough’s performance in TV’s The Long Walk to Finchley told us more about the sort of person Thatcher was than Streep does here.

Despite most of the rest of the cast being under-used though, there are some good performances. Jim Broadbent is very good as Denis Thatcher, although again his performance is partly a ghostly collection of mannerisms and excellent complementary acting. However the chemistry between he and Streep is magnificent and accounts for many of the film’s finest moments. Olivia Colman does sterling work under a bizarre fake nose as a no-nonsense Carol Thatcher. From the all-star cast of British actors, Roger Allam stands out as image-consultant Gordon Reece and Nicholas Farrell is superbly calm, cool and authoritative as Airey Neave. Alexandra Roach and Harry Lloyd are excellent impersonating younger Thatchers.

The Iron Lady could have been a marvellous, in-depth study of the politics of the 1980s, and a brilliant deconstruction and discussion of an era that still shapes our views of Britain today. However, it wavers instead into turning a woman defined by her public role and views into a domestic character, and brings no insight to the telling of it. By running scared of Thatcher’s politics altogether, it creates a film which makes it hard to tell why we should be making a fuss about her at all – making it neither interesting to those who know who Thatcher is, nor likely to spark interest in those who have never heard of her.

Brief Encounter (1945)

Love and life at a crossroads: Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in one of cinema’s greatest love stories

Director: David Lean

Cast: Celia Johnson (Laura Jesson), Trevor Howard (Dr Alec Harvey), Stanley Holloway (Albert Godby), Joyce Carey (Myrtle Bagot), Cyril Raymond (Fred Jesson), Everley Gregg (Dolly Messiter)

Brief Encounter is often hailed as one of the most romantic films ever made. This is astonishing really, as it’s actually a film about an affair where two married people with young families toy seriously with the idea of walking out on these families to run off together. Put like that, you can imagine thinking, how could I sympathise with this situation? The film’s magic is that you do.

Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) is a middle-class woman, married to loving but dull husband Fred (Cyril Raymond) with two young children. Every Thursday, Laura travels to Milford for the day for shopping and a trip to the cinema. One day she meets Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), a married doctor who works one day a week at the Milford hospital. Enjoying each other’s company they agree to meet again, but quickly find their ease and comfort with each other developing into a deeper relationship – with infidelity on the cards.

Brief Encounter in many ways gets close to a perfect film. Its impact on people seems to be pretty near to universal. Perhaps because the film speaks to a certain universal truth: who hasn’t, at some point in their life, found themselves attracted to someone they shouldn’t be, and who hasn’t been tempted at some point to throw their life up in the air and embrace something new and exciting? The film carefully presents these temptations in a totally non-judgemental and empathetic way, and acknowledges the romance and enticement of the forbidden.

The film also perfectly captures the magical discovery of falling in love, the tingling excitement of every second spent in the company of that new found love-interest. It’s there throughout Johnson and Howard’s interactions: their smiling eagerness, the way their eyes light up and body language opens out when they speak to each other (compare to how closed off they are when speaking to anyone else). There is a relaxed pleasure about it – an innocence and spring-time joy that makes you forget that this is a couple toying with shattering their families in a passionate affair. There is a reason the film is set in a train station – it has a transient, chance-meeting sense about it, with the station being a “neutral” ground far away from both characters’ homes where it is easier for them to pretend to be “other people” – it removes many of the possibilities for the film’s would-be affair to be perceived as sordid or wrong.

The plot also hinges effectively on fleeting moments of chance that cause either joy or pain (usually the latter). Most obviously we have Doll’s interruption of their final moments – enough to make any of us scream at the screen – but their very first meeting is caused by the random chance of a piece of grit flying up at the right place at the right time. The relationship is only unconsummated due to Alec’s friend returning to a flat early (and his sneering contempt for Harvey’s planned adultery is the only scene where a third party shatters the illusion of a perfect romance that could cause no harm to anyone). The lovers encounter friends and have to concoct unconvincing spur-of-the-moment reasons for why they’re together. It’s this constant feeling of chance and chaos around the edges of the drama that provides the sense of danger that keeps this relationship alive and empathetic.

Laura and Alec are grown-up and intelligent adults, aware of the consequences of their actions, and the film keeps this constantly at the forefront. Part of the reason we can “relax” into this would-be affair is that we have already seen at the start that the relationship will end, meaning we can simultaneously root for this meeting of hearts and minds, while knowing that no one (other than the couple themselves) will be hurt. Imagine if the film had opened with Fred’s tear-stained face? Would all the romantic boat rides and illicit kisses on a country bridge still have made us feel warmly towards Laura and Alec?

Watching this film again, I actually started to think about how Lean developed as a director from these smaller scale, script-led Coward films to the sweeping, grandiose epics that he is best remembered for today. In Brief Encounter his command of mise-en-scene is so complete – and in Celia Johnson he has such an expressive actor – that the dialogue in voiceover (for all of Johnson’s excellent delivery) often feels superfluous; it tells us nothing that simply looking at the picture hasn’t already communicated.

Look at the scene after Laura flees Alec’s borrowed apartment: Johnson’s stunned, panicked, guilty face is the camera’s focus, as we follow her, head down, moving fast through the streets without aim or direction, the score swelling behind her. Later she sits smoking on a park bench. Her conflicted emotions of guilt, shame and shock that she should do such a thing are clear, not just from the acting, but also the construction of the scene. Although the score helps, you could watch the scene silent and know exactly what was happening and what Laura was thinking about. But the film continues with Laura’s voiceover as she details everything her face is telling us. Take a look at the sequence here (64minutes and 42 seconds in):

Was it at points like this that Lean started to move towards his later films, where the language of cinema took the place of the language of speech? Later he would place so little information about the real Laurence of Arabia in that film’s script that nearly everything is interpreted from O’Toole’s expressive face. I think you can see the roots of it here – brilliant visual touches that capture the immediate intimacy between Alec and Laura, or the way the camera holds itself steadily on Laura while she prepares her evening make-up and calmly lies for the first time in her life to her husband. In the entire construction of this film, its detailed and perfectly paced building of a sense of Greek tragedy around a slim story, you see a master film-maker, a genius of visuals and compositions. You don’t need the extra explanation, it’s all there on the screen for us.

Camera choices are sublime: look at the staging of Alec/Laura’s final meeting: first time round, the camera moves lightly past them, focused on Holloway and Carey’s characters. Despite that, we get an overwhelming sense that something important is happening just out of shot – reinforced when Dolly interprets them. Flash forward to the end of the film, as the scene is restaged – now Dolly practically forces herself into the frame (in one great shot, the camera watches Alec leave through the door before Dolly literally walks in front of the shot to sit down at the table). The careful, comfortable composition of Alec and Laura sharing the frame together – and the way she never does so with her husband (until the very end of the film) alone tells us visually as much about the relationships as any dialogue could.

What is fascinating is that this is remembered by so many people as being about the control of emotions. Watching it again, I remembered how far this was from the truth. Alec and Laura speak their feelings for each other with an almost wild abandon once the floodgates are open – Alec’s expression of devotion while they dry off in the boat house is as frank and heartfelt a declaration of love as you are likely to hear. Laura’s emotions – her joy and her pain – are not only written across her face, but spilled out across the screen in voiceover. The characters button this up when with others, but alone they are as high on love as a pair of first-date teenagers. Throughout, the writing of their dialogue is spot-on – from their initial slight shyness to the way their lines interlock and complement each other. Again, compare how Laura talks with Alec – naturally, freely, each line developing smoothly from the other – with how she communicates with everyone else in the film (haltingly, distant, talking at cross purposes, subject matter changing from line to line). I could do without chunks of the voiceover, but the dialogue is sublime, both in its style and its construction.

You can’t go far wrong either when you have actors as good as this, with such chemistry. Celia Johnson gives one of the most perfect, iconic performances in the history of cinema. Does she strike a wrong note once? I’ve already waxed lyrical about her expressiveness – but watch her in every scene, you always know what she is thinking. Her understanding of Laura is complete, and she brilliantly shows throughout the torn loyalties between the life she has and the one she could have – between making herself happy and doing “the right thing”. The film is really her story and Johnson creates a character I can’t imagine someone not relating too. Her voice is in a way ripe for parody with its crisp 1940s tones, but along with her beautifully expressive eyes under the surface of that stiff-upper lip sharpness, there are wonderful beats of emotion and desperation.

Trevor Howard is equally good as Alec Harvey – it’s amazing to think this was only his second film role. Harvey is a character we are slightly distanced from in comparison with Laura – it’s arguable that, since the film is delivered through Laura’s voiceover, we only see him (except in the opening moments) as Laura perceives him. Howard has a charm, a gentleness and an honour about him that make him a man we can relate to, but the actor also brings an edge of danger to him that make him a plausible would-be adulterer. Early in the film it’s Alec who makes the running, pushing for dinners and bunking off work for cinema trips. It’s he who sets up the possibility of consummating the relationship, and makes the first formal declaration of affection. In fact you can see, in that slight edge that Howard gives it, why some have plausibly argued that Harvey could be a serial seducer. But that’s subtext – like Johnson, Howard is perfect.

Brief Encounter is one of those films that rewards constant reviewing. It’s a brilliantly told, tightly structured and beautifully shot story that is also deeply moving and emotional, because it feels so real. It’s possibly one of the best expressions on film of falling in love, and all the excitement and danger that it brings. Perhaps that is why it moves us, and continues to have such appeal – all of us have had that excitement of spending every moment you can with someone else, of sharing everything with them. It’s an addictive and exciting feeling, and this film captures it perfectly. It also moves us because, deep down, we like sad tragic endings – they have real impact when we have related so strongly to the characters, and they stick with us. Because, you always remember when you have been heartbroken – and seeing it so vividly brought to life by Celia Johnson in a truly great performance helps to make this film permanently rewarding.

Trainspotting (1996)

Another happy day in Edinburgh… Ewen Bremner, Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle define their careers in the mid-1990s phenomenen

Director: Danny Boyle

Cast: Ewan McGregor (Renton), Ewen Bremner (Spud), Jonny Lee Miller (Sick Boy), Robert Carlyle (Begbie), Kevin McKidd (Tommy), Kelly Macdonald (Diane), Peter Mullan (Mother Superior), Eileen Nicholas (Mrs. Renton), James Cosmo (Mr. Renton), Shirley Henderson (Gail Houston), Stuart McQuarrie (Gav), Irvine Welsh (Mikey)

Surprise, surprise the Drug’s Don’t Work. They just make you worse. Honestly, watching Trainspotting you would have to be a Grade A moron or wilfully missing the point to ever imagine that this film could, in any way what-so-ever, be endorsing the life of heroin addiction. The unbalanced, unreliable, sickly-looking, soul crushingly blank-eyed losers in this film are no-ones idea of an aspiration. The fate of Tommy alone, starting the film as a health freak and ending it as a smacked out, paper thin, wasting AIDS victim could only encourage the truly unbalanced to take up drugs.

You must know the story: Ewan McGregor is our “hero” Renton, a junkie with delusions every so often (the film implies this has occurred multiple times) of going clean, kicking the habit only to find that he is always drawn back in – largely it seems due to his own weak personality. Fellow junkies include Spud (Ewan Bremner), Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) and later (tragically) Tommy (Kevin McKidd). On the edge of their junkie circle (not a user) is psychotic Begbie (Robert Carlyle) who doesn’t need drugs when he can get a high from starting a bar fight. The basic plot is slim in this whipper sharp film where experience is all – Renton goes clean, gets sucked back in, misses prison, goes cold turkey, escapes to London, gets sucked back into a drug deal. That’s basically it. What’s important here is the experience.

This is possibly one of the best films about addiction ever seen (I watched it in a double bill with The Lost Weekend which actually works out as a pretty natural combo). Boyle and screenwriter Andrew Hodge aren’t scared to show that drugs at times can be fun (after all if they didn’t make you feel good part of the time why would you do them?) and they can give colour to life (particularly to the shallow non entities this film centres on). The is even a strange family warmth to Renton and friends getting smacked out in an otherwise disgusting dilapidated drug pit, listening to Sick Boy dissect the Sean Connery Bond films. This is then brilliantly counterbalanced by the appalling lows – from the truly unsettling dead baby, abandoned and unfed in said drug den, to Renton’s appalling cold turkey.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing here is that Danny Boyle directs with such verve and with a gleeful delight for every single shooting and editing trick in the book, but the film never feels like a triumph of style over substance, or as if the tricks are the centre of the director’s attention. Instead throughout the whole film you can tell the heart of the film makers – and therefore the heart of the viewer – is also focused on the story and the characters. So we get a film that crackles with energy, with a sense of youthful vitality (that is vital to understanding its characters), has an attractive anti-society message – but also reminds us that the perils of following this kind of counter culture life can be truly horrifying.

At the centre of this film is Ewan McGregor, who I don’t think has ever found a role that he could seize and bring to life as successfully as he did with this one. McGregor is captivating, managing to skilfully demonstrate without any judgement a man who believes he is strong, but is in fact desperately weak. His performance is so charismatic that you hardly notice that Renton is, actually, a pretty nasty person. High or not he has a barely concealed contempt for nearly everyone around him, his reaction to the baby death is shockingly cold, his treatment of Tommy laced with indifference, his pronouncements to the audience overflow with self-regard and delusion. But you just don’t notice.

What you do notice is that Robert Carlyle’s Begbie is a total nutter. Just like McGregor, I think Carlyle struggled to find a role that matched this one, probably not helped by the string of psychos he was offered by casting directors. Carlyle again actually isn’t in the film that much, but he nails how terrifying total self belief can be when matched with a complete lack of any moral sense. In fact most of the cast have hardly ever been better. Excellent support also comes from Peter Mullan, Eileen Nicholas, James Cosmo, Shirley Henderson and Stuart McQuarrie while Irvine Welsh pops up as low rent dealer.

Electric film making with a heart, I don’t think even Danny Boyle has topped this. There is something strangely perfect about this film – anything more and it might out stay it’s welcome, but every scene has something magic in it, some little touch that stays in the mind – either performance, dialogue, direction or all three. It looks fantastic and seemed to define its era. So fingers crossed for the sequel. No pressure…