sean bean – filmcentric

British director Clio Barnard has been exploring local stories, primarily ones that deal with working-class lives, since her debut feature The Arbor (2010) and then again with The Selfish Giant (2013).

I think Clio Barnard is a very talented director, and I think there are sequences here that are beautifully edited and put together: nicely shot, good use of sound and aural cues, and of course with the acting of Ruth Wilson (who is superb). It’s another film set in the North English countryside — not so much God’s Own Country as The Levelling (or indeed Barnard’s earlier films, though they were more urban I feel) — but here the glowering oppressive sky really is that, a crushing force on everyone. Like that latter film, it deals with poisoned relationships between fathers and daughters (I think now of Sunset Song too in that respect), and it doesn’t take very many flashbacks for it to become clear just what that is going to turn out to be. In fact, it’s obvious from the very first second of the very first flashback just where this particular arc is tending, but the way it’s developed in a melodramatic final act seems somewhat heavy-handedly literal. However, the acting (by Wilson, mainly), and the sheer filmmaking nous is for me enough to carry the film. Sure it’s dark and it moves lugubriously, but it is a properly cinematic film.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Clio Barnard; Cinematographer Adriano Goldman; Starring Ruth Wilson, Mark Stanley, Sean Bean; Length 89 minutes.
Seen at Curzon Bloomsbury, London, Wednesday 28 February 2018.

2020 UPDATE: I’ve since rewatched this a number of times, and have revised my rating upwards. I believe it is a modern science-fiction masterpiece of sorts, and while it has a ragged quality to some of its wilder reaches, and can get a bit too frenetic at times, it makes a case for cinematic vision.

The Wachowskis are filmmakers with a strong directorial vision, who’ve put some pretty good films together (also, admittedly, some bad ones; I do not intend to make a case for any of the Matrix sequels), so when you see the kind of critical mauling that Jupiter Ascending has been getting from some quarters, well I think that’s as good a recommendation as any to get oneself along to the film in question. Sure, it’s a big confusing mess, but there’s nothing in it that seems to invite the derision it’s been getting, though this may in fact be down to a lot of similar factors to Inherent Vice‘s reception — that the plot is so elaborate that it’s turned some viewers off. But, weirdly, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, this is a much an exercise in evoking the fabric of a lost world (or, here, an imagined universe), which should always be something worth celebrating. It’s no mean feat to try and visualise the textures of such a vast system of planets (think Star Wars) and power factions (think Dune), so if there’s a bit of recycling involved, well that’s to be expected — in fact, one sequence has such an indebtedness to Brazil that Terry Gilliam himself turns up. There’s plenty enough that’s unfamiliar — new experiences and imagery, created jargon for new technology — that as a viewer you feel sympathy for Mila Kunis’s titular heroine Jupiter when, like Vice‘s Doc, she is called on to continually express confusion at what’s happening. It’s refreshing too to see a woman playing the central character for such a big film — she is a lowly Russian cleaner who turns out to be (via some method) the owner of Earth — though Channing Tatum (with quite the silliest facial hair of the season) provides plenty of valuable support as the ‘spliced’ mercenary (think Guardians of the Galaxy, perhaps) who has her back. The acting star here though is Eddie Redmayne, who chews up the scenery with such a hammy performance that it goes through badness to being sheer genius, and perfectly matches the tone of the film. Other performers can be uneven, and taken as a whole it doesn’t always hold together perfectly, but as an experience it’s every bit the equal in imagination and scope as any other big budget blockbuster, and as a “space opera” it’s more interesting than any nonsense from 1977.

CREDITS
Directors/Writers Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski; Cinematographer John Toll; Starring Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Eddie Redmayne, Sean Bean, Douglas Booth; Length 127 minutes.
Seen at Vue Croydon Grant’s, London, Saturday 14 February 2015.