Hamnet

A single work of art may, or may not, be able to change the world, but it can surely change a mind. To those unfamiliar with the plot of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, about William Shakespeare, his wife Agnes, and the death of their titular son, this may seem a peculiar takeaway from Chloé Zhao’s film version, adapted by both O’Farrell and Zhao. The first half or so covers William and Agnes’ meeting, marriage, and their life with their three children; their son’s shocking death midway makes the second half a portrait of unfathomable pain and grief, during which time the couple are living largely separate lives. Agnes raises her two remaining children in Stratford-upon-Avon, while William works on a new play in London. When it — Hamlet — debuts, only one person in the audience appears to grasp its true meaning: Agnes. She’s been suffering not only one devastating loss, but also the loss of the spousal emotional intimacy she’d once craved and cherished. But in that loss, the physical and emotional distance from her husband, he’d been developing not only arguably his most famous, accomplished work of art, but one designed, in some part, to help him cope with his son’s death. Watching it performed for the first time, Agnes’ anguish and bitterness begins to dissipate. Her mind changes.

Hamlet may, at least in concert with the rest of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, have changed the world, but Zhao’s Hamnet may not. The emotional astuteness of O’Farrell’s book is most tangible in this adaptation, but it’s belaboured to the point of bluntness. Zhao’s film is initially slight and banally pretty, accented by a portentousness in certain ominously over-emphasized details that signal its midway shift; thereafter, it’s an exercise in glum monotony, hitting the same sad note over and over in an apparent attempt at wringing every last tear out of every last viewer’s eyes. There’s no subtlety since it’s all so heavy-handed, and no nuance since Zhao seems occupied with this one thing alone. Grief, as all who have had the misfortune of experiencing it will know, is indeed a slog, but it’s hard to discern any need for a film about grief to be a similar slog.

Zhao really only exhibits delicateness in Hamnet, and the film lacks the tonal modulations required to make its affective aims succeed. Her soft and slow approach may place some viewers in a rapture, or it may leave some searching for depth and details that simply aren’t there. And all the softness serves only itself — Lukasz Zal’s cinematography is lovely but inexpressive, Max Richter’s score pleasant but formulaic. The film overcomes its engineered poetic niceness only once: the central tragedy is obviously inevitable from early on, but it’s the sole moment when things snap out of their general lugubrious torpor. That it does so is down to the contribution of Jessie Buckley.

As Agnes, Buckley is vivid without being melodramatic, sensitive without settling into mumbling mundanity (the same cannot be said for Paul Mescal as William, whose riverside reading of the celebrated “To be or not to be” speech is comical in its wrenchingly heartfelt understatement, not to mention contradictory when compared to the energetic performance he tries to coax out of his players in a preceding rehearsal scene). In her son’s death scene, Buckley delivers a truly startling, authentic depiction of sudden agony and disbelief. Amid all of Zhao’s futile stabs at eliciting an emotional response from her audience through a surfeit of piety, it’s here and only here that it’s elicited, and it’s through Buckley’s astonishing access to the most primal human feelings.

Buckley aside, though, Hamnet is an exceptionally and inescapably dreary film. It has a lone purpose: to make its audience weep and weep and weep. Zhao’s film isn’t built to make you think, or to make you feel anything other than heartache — it’s a numbing watch, and an infuriating one, since the director misses her mark so consistently, and in such a consistent way. Hamnet is a film built to melt even the stoniest hearts, but in its insistence on doing so, it might just turn a few melted ones to stone. — PADAÍ Ó MAOLCHALANN

Dreams

An old army colleague of mine, Colonel Cosgrove, wept today. He wept at a world so crude and bleak. “Could it be,” his red eyes meeting mine, “that we are so base and low, so utterly lost, that we must deprave ourselves and our fellows? I believe in transgression, but there are limits.” These are the words of a good man. Colonel Cosgrove, who saved my life on Iwo Jima, speaks in defence of the downtrodden. Why flatulate upon a moral cause with vulgar provocation? But there is an itch in his argument. After all, is there a sentence that goads a provocateur more than the acceptable bound of transgression? Is a transgression that does not transgress acceptable transgression really much of a transgression at all? But this line could be misused. One could equally defend any representation on the justification of it being unacceptable (and therefore daring). If the transgression of Michel Franco’s Dreams is to be defended, then there must be some artistic purpose for its inclusion. Let’s investigate this possibility.

The transgression in question occurs in the final third of Dreams. Fernando (Isaac Hernández), a Mexican dancer who had attempted a relocation to San Francisco, discovers that his occasional lover and wealthy patron Jennifer (Jessica Chastain) intentionally had him deported, so as to better enable their “relationship”; which is to say, so she can remain completely in control of him. In his fury, he rapes Jennifer. We might, in basic dramaturgical terms, read this as an extreme retaliation. But it cannot be only that. It is not a normal dramaturgical action, and it is fundamentally loaded (not merely in the immigrant context, but in any context) to bias an audience immediately and permanently against its perpetrator. More than any other crime, even inclusive of murder and torture, rape is the unforgivable act. Why does Franco deploy it here? To suddenly shift sympathy to Jennifer, at her most horrendous low? Likely not. It seems instead a representation of the abject, and a final desecration of an entirely superficial relationship. In the context of his life, Jennifer has destroyed Fernando: she has toppled him at the precipice of his dream (he was to dance lead in a San Francisco show, independent of her), and she has declared herself an enemy who will (doubtless) repeat this act. She has determined that Fernando must live according to her will. He is entirely subject to her. Fernando then, himself become abject, his dreamt-of life ended, joins himself to complete destruction. He will commit the gravest act possible; Jennifer’s act has demolished all pretence of human amity.

But this analysis is perhaps short. There is a degree to which this scene culminates the essence of their relationship. While couched as a romance from early in the film, it is evident that Jennifer and Fernando are a solely carnal coupling. The desire between them is fundamentally real — but what extends beyond this desire differs considerably. Jennifer hopes to have complete dominion over her sexual toy, which — as it happens — would include the trappings of a romantic relationship. But entirely on her terms; entirely as according to her fantasy. She must be the benefactor, and he must owe her total fealty. Fernando, who is, up until this final evil, basically sympathetic, nonetheless lets slip his own ideas. A late scene shows his obvious desire for a legitimizing marriage; Jennifer is his route (in body and capital) to independence and to America. But each of these extended ideas has its basis in that real desire; however, the “real desire” therefore renders the opposite party as little more than a sex object. Fernando is to be kept; Jennifer is to be fed. But each is only real to the other, and each is only truly desirable to the other, when nude and panting. To then violently strip all the illusion of romance, and to cast away that ‘extended’ purpose, reduces Jennifer (in the eyes of Fernando) to a hateful sex object. And if he is conquered in every region but sex, then sex becomes the last remaining expression of power. He remains, if nothing else, a man; he takes up the patriarchal prerogative. 

Franco indicates a complete breakdown of human feeling; he posits the ultimate act of violence. A man in this state cannot be redeemed. We see that at the foot of Fernando’s behaviour has been a sinister edge; this is a story of mutual (though not, by that nature, equal) exploitation. The previous acts tread a similar line, though not so crudely. Franco styles short, static scenes, which cut at their first point of emphasis; his is a long montage of blunt ideas, conveyed in clean, sharp images. Newcomer Hernández provides an uneven if generally proficient turn; Chastain has presumably made the boldest decision in her career, and she lifts the work considerably. She is dressed exquisitely by Mitchell Travers; hers is a wardrobe that repels underlings. But it seems generally true that Franco only has so much to work with. Dreams is a lean, direct, and narratively uncomplicated piece; even then it seems to dawdle in passagework, and scenes that overstep credulity (the frigid sex-talk could be justified, but Chastain’s Babygirl pint-chugging creates an association few would envy). A more generally compelling work might then find a heavy accent in its final transgression; Dreams risks the ship by calling full steam in the shallows. Does it make port? — MILO GARNER

The Voice of Hand Rajab

“The voices on the phone are real.” So states the caption that appears on screen early in Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, as Palestinian Red Crescent volunteer Omar (Motaz Malhees) answers a call. The actors are real. The script is real. The fiction is real — this is a dramatization of events that genuinely occurred in Palestine in January 2024. But the voices on the phone are real in a different, nonfiction sense. Hind Rajab, six of her family members, and two paramedics were killed by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip. In Ben Hania’s film, we hear Hind’s voice, but we see a fictionalized version of the rescue attempt that failed to save her life. It’s her voice, but it’s not her story.

Omar is one of several volunteers working non-stop over many hours to save Hind, trapped in the back of a car, surrounded by the corpses of her family after an Israeli attack. Ben Hania traps the audience too, in the Red Crescent office, as time passes, hope waxes and wanes, and tension increases. The injection of suspense into a true, well-documented story is often questionable, not least when the outcome is as broadly known as it is here. Given the scale of the Palestinian suffering, though, the non-historical context, and the sheer heinousness of what happened to Hind and her family, it’s particularly distasteful. But Ben Hania doesn’t want to place her audience in Hind’s position, to evoke her pain or her fear. She wants to place us in the Red Crescent office, to experience a manipulative rollercoaster of emotions with the murder of a five-year-old as the fuel.

Ben Hania’s movie is an exploitative one both in effect and in intent. That it should prioritize a cynical depiction of the stress and horror of the volunteers over an earnest depiction of Hind and her situation is lamentable enough, but Ben Hania yields to melodrama and didacticism even within the misguided framework of her scenario. There are poignant anecdotes, dramatic interruptions, cutesy running gags, camera effects, political speeches, a panoply of the bluntest, most theatrical dramaturgical devices that will no doubt appeal immensely to middlebrow, middle-class European audiences who’ve been trained to view this crude, reductive style of filmmaking as fine and complex. It seems designed to generate the maximum emotional response, but in a simplistic, familiar way — for all the pain on display in The Voice of Hind Rajab, it’s never even a remotely difficult or discomfiting watch.

That is, alas, unless one resists its manipulation and analyzes its purpose, rather than its effect. Just as Hind’s last hours alive are used for dramatic ends, her image is even used — Omar brandishes it toward his supervisor, Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), in the hope of expediting her rescue effort. The image is used against the audience, too — a reminder less of the tragedy of what happened to Hind, more of the sorrow and sympathy we should be feeling, since that tragedy is, in Ben Hania’s movie, secondary to her would-be rescuers’ story. The handheld camera and temporal ellipses are used to engender a sense of immediacy, enhancing the urgency through claustrophobia and real-time dramatics. And the blend of real audio footage and staged re-enactment is used to emphasize the verity of the events herein. But no artistic recreation can ever be truly objective, and Ben Hania’s hammy editorializing cheapens and diminishes the value of that verity. A real atrocity, part of an immeasurably greater atrocity that is, today, still far from over, has been stripped for pieces and used, used, and used again, and for the most banal, unremarkable movie otherwise.

Ben Hania’s work here, in striving for immediacy, may seek to be seen as immersing its audience in the situation it depicts, and, in fairness, it achieves this. But this is an evasion of its duty, in its cynical exploitation of both the story of Hind Rajab’s death and the recordings that captured her final hours, not to immerse an audience already largely at considerable remove from the horrors of those hours in said horrors, but to confront us with them. Instead, we watch figures at their own remove from those horrors. The voices on the phone are real, but, for the audience, the threat is not. It’s abstract and unseen, not the active, genocidal threat that is directly responsible for Hind Rajab’s death. This is one of the crassest, most irresponsible movies in a very long time, not in spite of its well-meant intentions, but due to them. — PADAÍ Ó MAOLCHALANN

Silent Friend

Looking with a cynical eye, one might accuse Ildikó Eyendi — and not just in Silent Friend — of banality. The film’s three stories, taken individually, tend toward this descriptor. One: a feminist historical in which an ambitious woman grinds against patriarchal brickheadedness, but triumphs on sheer ability. Two: a boy in love with the wrong kind of girl, who finds real purpose in work and study. Three: two men separated by suspicion and a language barrier who find a way to communicate. Nothing in any of those is revelatory. Each story takes the curve expected. Naturally, communication is the subject: each story’s general idea is that of people failing to adequately express themselves to one another. In the first story we have a woman and her intentions misapprehended by men of the old-fashioned kind; it is therefore a tale of alienation and resilience. In the second story, the girl and the boy share some common frisson but otherwise completely misunderstand one another on an intimate level. In the third story, the distance is compounded not only by language, but also by context: the mysterious behaviors of an Asian man during the Covid pandemic stoke a prejudice that is, ultimately, superstition. The stories are joined by location — they are all set, in 1908, 1972, and 2020, in Marburg University. The parallelism is served by various formal tricks — each film is shot in a different format (monochrome 35mm, color 16mm, and digital respectively) — and by certain repeating objects and locations. Eyendi does not become too fusty or algorithmic in her comparison: this is not, for instance, an anthology of stories centered around the same gingko tree. The tree is essential to one story and passing in the others. Equally, a Goethe text appears in two but not in the third. The possibility for an architectonic rendering of time is passed up. The film is far looser in its course.

The theme of communication is burnished in the subplot of each story, by which each protagonist is a scientist, and each seems to have some interest in understanding the nature of plant life. That there is some flora-fauna connection (described as novel via Linnean categorization in 1908), and that this connection could indicate direct communication (as in 1972); and that this communication might be quantified and translated (as in 2020). There is something of the banality of these stories that perhaps presupposes the idea of progress. Progress invents banality. The antifeminist bollards seem to us immediately outmoded, though their ideas were conventional in their day; the free love of 1972 is no longer shocking; and the Covid hysteria has in the most part died down. In each story, the scientific forward-step is taken for granted in the chronological next: Grete oversteps the illustrations of Goethe to produce intimate (a point made with metaphorical force) close-up images of plant life. There is something individual and personal about nature photography that must elude nature illustration; one seeks to find the general in the specific, whereas the other prefers a more orderly array of exemplars. To treat a plant as a subject, and not merely set decoration, is the ideological breakthrough. This is the claim of Eyendi: that she has inherited Grete’s practice by making the Gingko tree on campus the one character who recurs through each story. Hannes, with Gundula, advances the idea of real, measurable communication between plant and animal life. That it is possible for Hannes, in a somewhat fantastical aside, to develop a more meaningful relationship with an inanimate than with his would-be girlfriend. At the very least: something is being said, and there is some reciprocity between both wings of the natural world. The final segment takes this assumption as granted, but intends to seek out the very specific points of commonality between the floral and faunal experience of the world. Is it possible to really relate to (for instance) a tree; can one empathize with the botanical garden? This may be the steel-tip of that banal feeling: which is to say, everything taken for granted was once remarkable. That we may one day understand, however that can be defined, the language of trees could eventually be seen in the same light. That it was there but unmeasured; one of those now obvious facts that seemed to elude centuries of closely observed science. That is, after all, the purpose and the tragedy of science. It is a policy of progress that regularly unseats what appear to be definite facts. It asks for a curiosity, and for the basic ability to entertain the impossible, for so long as the hypothesis can be tested.

This is then the complementary spiritual idea: that there seems to stem from the human mind a tendency to anthropomorphize the natural world. That trees are sentinels, and flowers eyes, and the seasons life — for as much as Eyendi might give credence to scientific hokum, it appears the idea is in fact set on this upper plane, by which we seem to share something with all life and that we are bound, in some manner, to seek it out. Perhaps this even leads us toward a kind of panpsychism, by which consciousness is shared in by all matter, and life is a complex accrual of this conscious substance. In plant life, the arrangement is different, but perhaps not completely incompatible. In each of the three stories, a psychedelic experience is mooted (though in the middle story it is passed by); in each there is that New Age idea that parts of the brain with which we might better see the world are in a state of recession. But this is familiar material to chew upon. Eyendi’s real quality is in texture, and mood, and editing. These three stories are wound together on a gliding principle, the diegesis moving from one to another not necessarily on a principle of dramatic congruence (though there is a mutual climax), but rather in the way each story moves and stays still. Images of the gingko tree, often its branches and leaves, then resemble the various veins of the film; Eyendi will frequently cut back to the tree in each depicted decade, indicating — with some level of grace — the constant about which these disparate stories perambulate. Like in On Body and Soul, the quality of her imagery is perhaps more intriguing than the narrative she is expressing; there is a sense that this film is perhaps more incisive, or ambitious, than it actually becomes. But to in some way compound a written conceit with more allusive imagery is more interesting than the more common inverse. Eyendi’s most striking image is her last. She begins close to the gingko tree, and draws outward. The branches seem to explode from the trunk, reaching out, much farther than we would anticipate. The slowness of the zoom-out implies movement, and implies time, and implies direction. There is something in the ancient tree, we might call it petrified time, a series of apparent decisions and meanders, made certain for posterity. Perhaps more than any of her mawkish inner-dramas, it is this image — this apparent significance — that pulses through Silent Friend. — MILO GARNER

Saipan

If you weren’t around to experience it in real time, it will be hard to grasp how seismic the 2002 FIFA World Cup feud between Republic of Ireland manager Mick McCarthy and volatile star captain Roy Keane was. Ireland had squeaked through to the World Cup, and, before the tournament (which was being held in Japan and South Korea) began, the team went to the tiny tropical island of Saipan to acclimatize, practice and have a little fun. But Keane became increasingly dismayed. He complained about the team’s unpreparedness, the poor facilities, the abysmal condition of the training pitch, and even a training session that didn’t have goalkeepers because they were tired. He quit the team, then changed his mind, then gave a no-holds-barred interview to a newspaper. Tensions boiled over, McCarthy sent Keane home, and a nation was bitterly divided. All this is recounted and dramatized in Saipan, the new film from husband-wife director pair Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn (Ordinary Love). An exciting and enjoyable film, it details how Ireland’s footballing hopes could derail into a feud that dominated the national conversation.

For Keane (Éanna Hardwicke), a player whose standards were exceptionally high, this was all a matter of professionalism. How could his teammates be playing golf and partying days before the biggest sporting event on the planet? How could McCarthy (Steve Coogan) and the Irish FA support those antics? And why are there no footballs? Seeing news reports of the meticulous planning for England’s tournament only further exasperated the captain. However, Keane is also a man who is full of contradictions. He can be grumpy and tempestuous, individualistic and selfish. He is supposed to be the captain, the leader of his team, and yet he slags them off to the press and complains about every detail. According to McCarthy, he even skipped out of a teammate’s charity match (Keane says he was injured).

Impressively, despite this being a biographical drama with two distinctive and (at least in football circles) well-known figures, there are no broad caricatures here. Hardwicke is outstanding, embodying Keane and all his fascinating contradictions. He fully interrogates and embodies the player’s unapologetic, brusque manner, while also showing his softer side when spending time with wife Theresa (Harriet Cains). But more than anything, Hardwicke proves adept at channeling the anger perpetually simmering in Keane, ready to be let loose like a Celtic Tiger. Meanwhile, Coogan reaches toward and mostly musters the thing about McCarthy that has long made him stand out, even in the world of English association football: his oddness. Fittingly, there’s a little bit of Alan Partridge in his portrayal of a hapless manager who feels hassled and undermined, but who also manages it all with a measure of complacence that his captain lacks.

As for the film itself, Barros D’Sa and Leyburn take a poppy, almost music video-esque approach to Saipan. That means archive footage, abundant montages, quick cuts, MiniDV camera interludes, and a soundtrack that includes eternal earworms from the likes of Oasis and the Stone Roses. There’s a flashiness of style here that the real Keane would probably disapprove of tremendously, but there’s also some justification in it, as the directors attempt to aesthetically invoke the player’s fraught headspace rather than present a more straightforwardly true-life sports drama. And that stylization is a particular boon for a film that manages to be both riveting and uproariously funny at various points. The McCarthy-Keane feud is rendered as an old-as-time tale of steadfast men, a clash of egos that are inflamed by incompetence around them and pride deep within them. But just as football is a game of two halves, there are two sides to every story. Saipan’s savviest move is that though the audience may discern the film’s lean in one particular direction, it remains confident enough not to try to either solve or re-litigate the central conflict, and instead provide viewers the space to pick a side. — DANIEL ALLEN