La Vie et Rien d'Autre

This is a film made by Bertrand Tavernier in 1989. It is one of the best films about war, the effects war and coming to terms with war. It is set in 1920 and in it a major, played by Philip Noiret, is responsible for finding and identifying as many as possible of the 350,000 soldiers who were missing after the First World War.

Philip Noiret, Of course, is not just any actor, he is one of those actors who bring a huge presence and strength of personality to his work. He is the emotional core of this film which, nevertheless, is populated by and large cast representing a wide spectrum of society, military and civilian. Among them are two women both waiting for and seeking their men, who are still missing since the war. One, Alice, played by Pascal Vignal loses her job as a teacher at the beginning of the film and for most of its duration is working in a cafe. The other, Irène, played by Sabine Azéma, is high-born with aristocratic manners and expectations, and to underline the point she arrives in the film in a large, posh car driven by a chauffeur. Sabine Azéma Is a well established actress, having appeared in over forty films. I recognized her from two films I had seen, made by Alain Resnais, Smoking and No Smoking. I have read Janice Radway's 'Reading the romance' and so I am quick to spot early signs of a romance narrative in a film, so the romance in this film played out with no surprises for me. Indeed, I was able to tick of the essential romance elements as it proceeded.

I think that Bertrand Tavernier Is a sort of 'old school' man and filmmaker. In this film we see the class hierarchy laid out before us. Everyone seems to know their place and to act and think and perform according to it. I imagine that that is how it was in 1920 but it is not how we see things now.  Now, we do not think that people's ability, or quality, correlates with their class location. That is why we see so much injustice in class-structured societies. I think that that other fine French anti-war film, La Grande Illusion, better depicts society as a diversity of people overlain by a bizarre, constraining class structure making it, with its absence of predictable romance, a more satisfying film. Also, I don't think that Tavernier is much of a film stylist, but more of a 'set up the scene and point the camera at it and follow it' type of film maker, so we do not come to expect striking shots of use of photography. Nevertheless, La Vie et Rien d'Autre is an unusually good film that I have no hesitation is recommending.

Philomena

This is a deeply moving film about an investigation by a journalist, slightly lost at mid-point in his career, taken up as something to do. He assists a seventy-year-old woman, Philomena, in looking for the child who was forcefully taken from her when she was forced to live and work in a convent after becoming pregnant fifty years earlier. Everyone involved in this film emerges with a huge amount of credit (apart from organised religion). It is based on real events, and the journalist was Martin Sixsmith, one time BBC Russian correspondent and subsequently Tony Blair's director of communications. She is played by Judy Dench. The film is directed by Stephen Frears.

Judy Dench plays the part of an unsophisticated Irish woman excellently, and Steve Coogan, who co-wrote the screenplay, plays the part of Sixsmith modestly and well. The film moves between Ireland, where Philomena was incarcerated, and the United States, where her son was taken and lived his life before dying of AIDS. In the course of the film we discover that the convent was actively removing the children from their mothers and selling them to Americans for $1000; that the mothers were forced to work and could leave the convent only by paying £100; that the convent initially refused Pholomena any help in her search despite her son being buried in its grounds; that the convent lied about the availability of papers that would have been helpful, pretending that there had been a fire; that those in the convent believed that Philomena's unhappiness was the penance she should pay for having yielded to the power of sex. Sixsmith progresses from mild interest in Philomena's plight to anger as they uncover the terrible history of injustice and becomes more angry than Philomena, who remains unshaken in her Catholic faith.

Captain Phillips

This is a gripping edge-of-your-seat film about the highjacking of an American freighter captained by Tom Hanks with a short, mature, grey beard and sensible glasses, looking like a mid-western academic. It follows the hijacking from the beginning of the voyage, when Captain Phillips takes command of the ship, to the final resolution when - surprise, surprise - the American government, deploying three warships, a helicopter and, of course a team of invincible SEALs (which stands for Sea, Air, Land Teams) brings the film to a predictable conclusion, doing their SEAL-like heroics, in this case involving parachutes. The arrival of SEALs is like the fat lady singing in another context - it brings the story to a well-ordered conclusion according to the audience's expectations and the conventions of the genre. Lantern jaws and short haircuts are de rigeur as serious-looking military types, always refraining from smiling, bark phrases into their walky-talkies. Don't they have any unsuitable types, with floppy hair, smiling at inappropriate moments, and not taking the proceedings as seriously as they should?

The ship is highjacked by a bunch of Somalis who seem intelligent, if a little wild-eyed and unstable on occasions, and very focused on their goal of extracting several million dollars from who-ever they can persuade to pay up (the film does not make it clear who's pockets are in the firing-line, unlike Tobias Lindholm's recent film, A Hijacking, which focused on the negotiation process). Catherine Keener has an amazingly small part for such a well-known actress, and I suspect that most of her contribution - probably as distressed wife at the end of a telephone line - ended up on the cutting room floor. Still, Hanks has his hands full, with caring wife or not (he does find time to send her an email), degenerating in the course of the film from calm control to whimpering like a child. Given that the hijackers were demanding a very large sum of money, the absence of the ship's owners in the film is striking. It is known that the sea off Somalia is a hijacking hot spot, and it amazed me that a ship that size did not carry any weapons at all, given the number of guns on the US mainland. I would have thought that at least the captain would have had control of a cupboard containing arms.

The subtext of the film, the subliminal message, like that of many other American films flaunting the US's military hardware and prowess, is that the US has spent so much on its military equipment that it will never be beaten, and that the sixteen percent of it's population, and twenty percent of its children, who live in poverty, will just have to show a little understanding. Each time I saw in the film a radar screen, or a helicopter, or a gun, I asked myself 'how many schoolbooks did that cost?'.

A good film, like the recent Argo, for those who can switch off the political part of their brain for the sake of entertainment, and yield themselves to the pleasures of a straight-down-the-middle American genre movie. The director, Paul Greengrass, from Cheam in Surrey, has obviously made the Faustian pact. He is good at this sort of thing (he made The Green Zone, United 93 and a couple of Bourne films) and I hope he has a good career.