The 58th BFI London Film Festival showcases a cocktail of films that are to radiate the coming year
When the rain-soaked red carpets lie on Leicester Square it can only mean one thing: the London Film Festival is making its annual appearance, with attendant glamour and grit. It lasts 12 days, which is incidentally not the only thing it has in common with Christmas. The myriad of daily gifts include a showcase of filmmaking talent that will lighten up your lives over the coming year. There have been no lords reported a-leaping, at least not since Guy Ritchie took early retirement, but one Björk bailing on her planned appearance to promote the multimedia musical tribute Björk: Biophilia Live. She left one of her two directors, Peter Strickland, to face the press alone.
The film festival is large, diverse and aims to combine artistic prestige alongside commercial potential, with Brad Pitt’s vehicle Fury closing the event. It is a fully international event, but never let it be said that The Platform is not responsive to the mood of the times in post-imperial Britain. With that in mind, we are going to concentrate for the first of our festival dispatches solely on the films of our own fear, united isle.
The opening night was heralded by the gala premiere of The Imitation Game. The film follows the life of mathematical genius Alan Turing, responsible for the prototype of the computer. Turing was also a member of the Bletchley Park code-breakers, participant in the high pressure, secret and eventually successful efforts to decipher the German Enigma codes. This enterprise played a vital role in the defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War.
You might imagine that someone who helped determine the modern world would be garlanded with honours, but not Turing. He was rewarded by being arrested in 1952 for ‘gross indecency’ – because he was homosexual – and chemically castrated. Not long afterwards, he committed suicide. Clearly, sentimentality was not what made the British state great.
This film is solid stuff, making good, ensemble drama out of its period piece setting. There are strong performances from Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, and especially Benedict Cumberbatch, who takes the starring role. Collectively, they convey the conflicting emotions of the tale.
As a film, it is an example of how a nation’s artworks can be used to gain new understandings of the past, and how it can mark the changes in social attitudes that occur across the span of one lifetime. Last year, Turing was given a posthumous royal pardon for his conviction and his relegation to obscurity seems finally over. While the film’s sometimes formulaic conventions do not offer much in terms of path-breaking artistic flair, its presentation of eccentricity, rivalry and passionate obsession makes for compulsive viewing.
Historical memory and national character look like they will be no less present in other UK films on show, which are yet to be released as this article goes to press. In this centenary year of the start of WWI – which has seen Conservative education minister, Michael Gove, try to rescue its legacy as a noble sacrifice – Vera Brittain’s WWI memoir, Testament of Youth, brings to the screen the account of a nurse faced with the horrors of those wounded by war.
Given that our nation is once more at war, no less resonant is the dramatic target of ’71, a handheld scramble through the street-to-street fighting that met the British presence in Belfast. Jack O’Connell plays fresh-faced squaddie, who finds himself adrift in urban warfare and dependent on the clemency of the locals.
Bringing some more old-fashioned craft to the British entrants, A Little Chaos sees Kate Winslet playing a landscape gardener in the court of Louis XIV in Versaille. It is a film that promises to combine love and horticulture with the charms of courtly gossip. It will also be intriguing to see how Britain’s leading realist director, Mike Leigh, brings to life the last dyspeptic years of the English painter William Turner in Mr Turner, played by Leigh’s regular, hangdog acting muse Timothy Spall. At the other end of the painterly spectrum, the great living painter and character, as well as smokers’ rights activist, David Hockney, is profiled in the documentary Hockney: A Life in Pictures.
Celebrations of one aspect or another of British heritage are rather thick on the ground, but there are also several films that show a somewhat different side of our nation’s culture. The Goob interweaves impoverished blight with a sense of thoughtful lyricism in the life of the titular 16-year-old. The protagonist is a mistreated school-leaver who tries to take on the violent cruelty of his stepfather. The film’s imaginative ugliness somewhat brings to mind an entrant from last year’s festival, The Selfish Giant.
Night Bus looks like it will offer an amusing take on that most venerable of the capital’s public institutions, the nocturnal public transport system. But it is The Duke of Burgundy that confirms the brilliance of one of our most accomplished and interesting directors, Peter Strickland – yes, the same director stood up by the enchantingly temperamental Björk. Full of mystery and invention, he succeeds in crafting a vision of sensuality exceeding rational understanding in this picture of the dreamy disturbance of entrapping love.
Image from: Testament of Youth / www.screenyorkshire.co.uk