Film Blog

Ten years ago yesterday, I walked out of the screening of Monsoon Wedding feeling elevated and good about life only to discover that the world had changed forever. This weekend has been one of reflection and remembrance. The director of the festival, Piers Handling, conducted affairs on the day with great dignity and understanding. Someone who was able to keep his head while all around were losing theirs.

In that context, movies seem of little consequence but that is what I am here to attend to. I have been delighted by Lasse Halstrom’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, a delightful confection, as you would expect, from the maker of Chocolat, Cider House Rules and My Life as a Dog but what lifts it above the norm is that it has been written in genuine English by The Full Monty & Slumdog Millionaire writer, Simon Beaufoy. This is an English which is sarcastic, ironic and tinged with stiff upper lip sentimentality, in short, it is very much our vernacular.

360, which opens the London Film Festival is a modern day version of La Ronde by Francesco Mireilles, director of The Constant Gardner, panoramic and poignant but possibly more of a triumph of style over content.

Whit Stillman has amused and delighted with his wicked satires of the American social elite, a social group that he clearly knows well, with films like Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco. Damsels in Distress, his latest outing, is set in a university where the self defined arbiters of taste find themselves under attack from the Barbarian hordes which he portrays , more broadly than in previous films but as a contemporary Austen in New England.

WE is Madonna’s second feature, exploring the love affair of Wallis Simpson and Edward Windsor, paralleled with a contemporary New Yorker obsessed with the affair. It is flashy but heartfelt and one has plenty of scope to read autobiographical notes between the lines.

More later.

John