Lorna Irvine reviews a film with great moments and performances but weak depictions of women.
There is a telling moment halfway into John Boorman's follow-up to his wonderful film from 1987, Hope And Glory, when the adult Bill Rohan, now a typing instructor in the army during the Korean war, has taken his love interest to see Kurosawa's Rashomon. Visibly shaken by the depictions of rape, the young woman rails strongly against such violence on the screen, empathising with the victim. Bill however (really a young John Boorman) sees it with a detached filmmaker's eye, talking entirely in terms of perspective points and cinematic technique. This, of course, alludes to his own experiences and love of the form, as Boorman is definitely a director's director.
Most of the film works well, as insubordination and hijinks against authority figures ensue, mostly with Callum Smith's Bill and increasingly twitchy, troubled friend Percy (an uneven, distracting Caleb Landry Jones with a plethora of accents and tics), a double act who are very much products of their generation, rebelling against conscription, hell-bent on forging their own identities in the face of the old order.
The supporting cast are generally excellent, with Richard E Grant's world-weary, disdainful Major Cross hitting the whisky, Pat Shortt's Private Redmond as a comic foil and David Thewlis' officious Sgt. Major Bradley character finally succumbing to a breakdown.
And it's here that the film falters. Dramatically, it isn't strong enough to bring heft to the traumas of war, with clunky expositional choices that fail to gel. A speech on the Cold War is reductive. Hospital scenes are unconvincing, and both Bradley's mental illness and a young soldier who lost a leg from a landmine are played for laughs--wildly inappropriate, given the long, tense build-up.
The women, too, are problematic. It's as though the film is torn between romantic drama and high-farce, and the female characters make this implicit. Helen Montague (Tamsin Egerton), an enigmatic posho bit of stuff who Bill romanticises, is dubbed 'Ophelia' and makes dreary pronouncements on life, banging on about being dead inside--all haloed in almost soft focus lighting. Of course, she's too attractive and moneyed for Bill, adding little but fatalistic window dressing.
Windows feature too with Nurse Sophie, also existing as little more than object of lust--her bedside manner is what cures Bill's nerves. How charitable--and wholly predictable--yet Aimee-Ffion Edwards plays Sophie wonderfully, with a lot of impish glee and heart, and is responsible for the very funny scene involving one naked breast as the lads crane to peep into the nurses' quarters.
Only the now grown-up, big sister, impossibly glam Dawn (Vanessa Kirby) gets great lines, yet there is an incestuous sub-text to her relationship with Bill, and even she has to remove her clothes and go skinny-dipping, as though the boorish Boorman has to reinforce stereotypes about liberated women. We love 'em, eh? The dirty cows...hur, hur.
However, such obvious issues aside, Boorman has a lovely clear eye for detail and sense of place, even if this sequel pales against the original. Cigarettes arriving in parcels soaked with strawberry jam are luxuries to savour, the entire stolen clock sequence is beautifully paced, and the scenes pitting the lads against their superiors are laugh-out-loud amusing. There's nothing nicer than seeing oppressors getting their comeuppance. That's what the boys from dear old Blighty do so well, after all, what?
Written/Directed: John Boorman, 2014. Cast: Callum Smith, David Thewlis, Richard E Grant, Caleb Landry Jones, Vanessa Kirby, David Hayman, Tamsin Egerton, Pat Shortt.
Queen and Country is on the GFT Player On Demand:
www.glasgowfilm.org/player
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