Reviewing In The Name Of

****

Director: Danny Boyle

Starring: Dev Patel, Anil Kapoor, Irrfan Khan, Madhur Mittal, Freida Pinto

DANNY Boyle is often held up as one of this country’s great contemporary directors.

It’s a bandwagon I’ve often struggled to keep up with; or, more accurately, one that I’ve watched with curiosity and scepticism as it has trundled past.

Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, his opening shots across the bow, are, indeed, very decent and enjoyable films. But thereafter his work seemed to decline quite dramatically: 28 Days Later begins well but gradually descends into nonsense; the same can be said for Sunshine; A Life Less Ordinary is flimsy and poorly executed; Millions is sweet but hardly a milestone; and I’d rather not go into The Beach for fear of being unable to restrain my rant about a film that is such absolute tosh that it makes you question whether or not you’ve stayed awake or accidentally dropped off and dreamt the shoddy ending, the stupid plot holes and the woefully misjudged video game sequence - for anyone still unsure, you were awake and your dreams would probably have been better than this tropical tripe.

But aaaaanyway, we leave all that behind now; all previous missteps and naffness are forgiven, for Boyle has produced a wonderful new film that is stylish but not too flashy, heartwarming without being schmaltzy and, crucially, a coherent, engaging and thoroughly rewarding piece of storytelling.

The film opens with India’s version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, where 18-year-old Jamal Malik (Dev Patel, from UK teen drama Skins) is just one question away from the 20 million rupee grand prize.

A sudden cut then throws us into a dirty police cell. Jamal is being tortured by officers who are trying to force him into confessing that he cheated on the show. How else could a child raised in the Mumbai slums - a “slum dog” - know the answers to all of the questions?

Reviewing each question individually, Jamal proceeds to explain how he knew the answers, delving into the experiences from throughout his young life that have taught him such facts and, in the process, narrating the gripping, funny and emotional life story of a poor child growing up in modern India.

Indeed, this is very much a film about its host country, its Dickensian social problems and its changing place within the world. And it is a great strength of both Boyle’s direction and Simon Beaufoy’s (The Full Monty) script that the film is able to convey so much about the country while also telling an enthralling story. Matching the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? format for tension building at every turn, each question takes us further forward in Jamal’s life, revealing often tragic events and details as we edge towards the present, each chapter adding a new piece to the jigsaw that explains the sad and confused young man we see answering questions on a TV quiz show.

There are plenty of directors who could have made a great movie from this story, but I wonder how many of them would have nailed it as well as Boyle. His decision to use the fast and frenetic editing skills of Christopher Dickens (Spaced, Shaun Of The Dead etc) is spot on, lending such immediacy and excitement to the more action-packed scenes, particularly an early chase through the labyrinthine slums.

And such scenes benefit immeasurably from Boyle’s admirable eye for the dramatic angle and the fast, fluid camera work. The finishing touch is a great soundtrack (using music is something Boyle has always done well); a blistering collection of contemporary Indian hip-hop and dance that thumps its way along to traditional Indian instruments, melodies and scales, capturing the feel of this nation in transition, of heritage and modernisation, and the dawn of a new era.

Coming at the start of January, it’s hardly a compliment to say that Slumdog Millionaire is one of the best films of the year so far, but it is certainly Boyle’s best work since Trainspotting and may well offer him his first stab at an Academy Award. Either way, it’s a great achievement.

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Did You Know? Danny Boyle couldn’t find a suitable actor in India to play the lead role, and ended up casting Dev Patel after his daughter saw the young actor in UK teen drama Skins and urged her father to check him out.

**** 

Genre: Drama

Director: Toa Fraser

Starring: Jeremy Northam, Peter O’Toole, Sam Neill, Bryan Brown

“HOW on earth did they get the green light for that?” asked a friend incredulously after listening to my summary of Dean Spanley’s plot.

How indeed. This is a film about the Edwardian upper classes but without even the slightest hint of romance, hanky panky or upstairs-downstairs shenanigans; it’s a costume drama without Keira Knightley, in which the closest we get to a stunning, pale-faced beauty is a grumpy elderly maid; there are no lavish location shots, with much of the dialogue-heavy film taking place around a dinner table; and the narrative hinges on the past-life recollections of a man who apparently used to be a dog.

Okaaaay. So a period drama about reincarnation with an almost totally-male cast. It hardly screams “money-spinner”. Maybe next we’ll have a western about crystal healing. Either way, you can’t help thinking that it somehow slipped through the vetting net and was only made through pure fluke.

But, however it happened, it was worth the gamble, for Dean Spanley is a surprisingly charming and emotionally rewarding film.

As much about reconciliation as reincarnation, it centres on the strained relationship between Henslowe Fisk (Jeremy Northam) and his ailing curmudgeon of a father, Horatio (Peter O’Toole). Fuelled by the death of Henslowe’s brother in the Boer War and Horatio’s apparent failure to mourn his son’s killing, the difficulties and lack of affection in this father-son bond create a solid and interesting emotional core for the film, which is surrounded by the light-hearted whimsy of the reincarnation story.

This comes in the form of the titular Dean (Sam Neill), a taciturn and abrupt man who becomes considerably more vocal and engaging after a glass or two of a rare Hungarian wine - the catalyst for regression into his past life as a springer spaniel.

It takes some time getting there - during which you may wonder if the film has lost its way or become bogged down in the excessiveness of its own flowery prose - but Spanley’s past-life recollections eventually unite the reincarnation and reconciliation themes in a denouement that is deeply moving but never overstated.

In fact, the lengthy build up and its gnawing sense of inevitable failure only add to the reward and fulfilment of this wonderful closing chapter. For it is here that the frost covering the rest of the film suddenly melts away to reveal a genuinely heart-warming piece.

It is also the point at which a strong central cast fully demonstrate their abilities, with O’Toole in particular reminding us that age has diluted none of his consummate charm, wit and astounding ability.

Dog lovers and reincarnation believers are in for a treat with Dean Spanley - but so are the rest of us. As unlikely as it might sound, this is far more than niche nonsense and I for one am glad for the brave backers who funded it.

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Did You Know? The film is adapted from the 1936 novella My Talks With Dean Spanley by Lord Dunsany, although the father-son relationship was created for the film.

**** 

Genre: Drama

Director: Fernando Meirelles

Starring: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal, Danny Glover

DECIMATED cities. Human carnage. Mankind’s return to animalistic survivalism. Apocalypse.

Take a look back at cinema over the past seven years and it plays like a parade of disaster, with everything from aliens (War Of The Worlds) to zombies (too many to list) to monsters (Cloverfield) to mankind itself (Children Of Men) ravaging our cities and reflecting the unease of the post-9/11 world.

Blindness, the latest film from acclaimed director Fernando Meirelles (City Of God, The Constant Gardener), is an interesting, thoughtful and devastatingly bleak step along this post-apocalyptic path, with disease assuming the role of mankind’s havoc-wreaking nemesis.

Adapted from the novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramango, the film shows the effects of a sudden and highly contagious pandemic of blindness that envelops an unnamed city and, presumably, its host country and perhaps the globe.

The focus is on a small group of sufferers who are among the first to be affected. Among them is Danny Glover’s wizened and one-eyed waffler, Mark Ruffalo’s annoyingly earnest eye doctor and his wife, the only person not to be affected by the blindness disease (yet another excellent performance from Julianne Moore).

Being the earliest victims, they and dozens of others are quarantined in a disused hospital, under the surveillance of heavily armed guards but largely left to look after and govern themselves. And it is here, in these squalid, soulless corridors, that the film plots the debasement of humanity. While the Ruffalo-Moore gang try to establish a semblance of order - even community - the anarchic Gael Garcia Bernal and his cronies unleash a brutal rein of terror.

It is a decent into Gomorrah that thoroughly chills and revolts to the pit of the stomach, and proves considerably more shocking than the current fashion for torture porn. There are no deranged madman at work here; this is a vast swathe of mankind after the hands of its moral compass have been ripped off, with half the population now reduced to depraved, vicious beasts. Saying that this is a disturbing film is a bit like saying Charlie Chaplin was amusing or that 9/11 was a bad day.

And Meirelles never shies from the horrors of his Lord Of The Flies. His familiar manipulation of focus and light are, perhaps, put to their most effective use in Blindness, persistently testing the viewer’s own senses as he pitches curve balls of sudden noise, high pitched frequencies, moments in pitch black, then dazzling white, sudden and fast editing, blurred focus and extreme closeups.

The film’s most shocking scene takes place in virtual darkness, yet is still - by a long way - one of the most distressing pieces of film I have seen in a long time; a testament to the director’s skill.

There are a few holes - Danny Glover’s rambling and misplaced narration, the trudge towards a seemingly forced and unsatisfactory conclusion - but Blindness is, by and large, a thoroughly gripping and arresting film, and a thought-provoking portrait of the human race in our troubled and anxious times.

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Did You Know? Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation Of The Blind, has said the organisation “condemns and deplores” the film and its source novel, claiming it uses blindness as a “metaphor for all that is bad in human thought and action”, while depicting characters’ whose reactions to their blindness are “one-dimensional”. The group have organised protests against the film.

****

Director: Oliver Stone

Starring: Josh Brolin, Richard Dreyfuss, James Cromwell, Thandie Newton, Elizabeth Banks, Jeffrey Wright

THERE’S no getting away from the fact that the presidency of George W Bush has been a hugely significant chapter in American history, and one that will continue to define the American political and global landscapes for many years to come.

With this in mind, it seems less surprising that a penetrating biopic of his life and presidency can be released while the man is still in office. Film-makers could, in theory, have done the same with any president, but you just can’t see anyone bothering to put together a timely feature about Clinton or Bush Snr, or even Reagan for that matter.

“Dubya”, however, is a unique case: he is perhaps the most provocative and polarising president in living memory, inspiring the strongest and most extreme feelings of love and hate. Which makes it all the more surprising - and refreshing - that the notoriously left-leaning Oliver Stone has taken such a remarkably sympathetic view of him in his new film.

For his second presidential biopic (after 1995’s Nixon), Stone has carefully chosen some choice moments of mockery, having obvious fun with his so easily-ridiculed subject (how could he not?) but also showing the kind of restraint and fairness that observers predicted he would be incapable of. This is not a film of endless jibes and cheap shots, and actually paints the 43rd president as a tragic figure; it might sound hard to swallow, but Bush almost comes across as the victim of the piece.

In Stone’s eyes, he is an insecure prodigal son; a charming but self-destructive screw-up who spent his first 40 years drunkenly stumbling from one failed venture to another, spurned on by an inferiority complex that came from living in the shadow of both his father and his younger, higher-achieving brother.

And Stone makes a convincing case for this. Scenes of Bush’s presidency are interspersed with segments of his notorious younger years, tracing the life of the leader of the free world from drink driving Yale jock, through failed oil worker, failed congressional candidate and failed baseball team owner, to an eventually successful Texan governor, via a drink problem and the redemption (sobriety) he found in evangelical Christianity.

There are some strange omissions - dodged military service, suspected drug-taking, the controversial 2000 election - but the chosen episodes build a coherent and entertaining narrative that really hammers home just how unlikely a president this man really is.

Some of this makes for uncomfortable viewing, but the film’s hardest face slaps come from inside the White House, principally because the conversations and events depicted are still so close to home. Rather than trying to cover all bases, W. has a thankfully sharp focus, confining the presidential material to foreign policy (read: war) discussions in the two year period between the “axis of evil” speech and the aftermath of Iraq, when the administration realised that Saddam never had weapons of mass destruction. There are no domestic issues at play; simply the formation of the “with us or with the terrorists” mentality and the reprehensibly aggressive foreign policy it spawned.

Which is not an easy watch, by any means. Yes, we know what happened, we know the thinking that led to it and we know about the people behind it. But this doesn’t make it any easier to fight the feelings of shame, horror and hatred when we see even characterisations of people so irredeemably loathsome as Donald Rumsfeld, and are forced to accept that he and other such cronies were allowed to get away with all that they did.

Credit is, of course, due to an impressive cast in this regard, each of whom captures their subject without sinking into caricature. But it is Josh Brolin as the man himself who really steals the show. After his revelatory performances in No Country For Old Men and In The Valley Of Elah this late-blooming actor proves just how capable he is, with a pitch-perfect performance that is utterly convincing and several steps above mere impersonation.

W. is a confident and entertaining biopic that finds director Oliver Stone returning to familiar territory, with pleasing results. Some have tried to dismiss the film as a hastily thrown-together indictment of an unpopular incumbent president. Rather, it is an altogether decent portrayal that will most likely stand the test of time. If nothing else, we’re sure to look back on it more fondly than we do its subject.

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Did You Know? Christian Bale was initially cast as Bush and underwent weeks of prosthetics tests before pulling out at the last minute. Rumour has it that Warren Beatty and Harrison Ford were also offered the role.

*****

Director: Steve McQueen

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham, Stuart Graham

LONDON-born artist Steve McQueen has received plenty of acclaim for his previous work, the Turner Prize being just one of many accolades.

But the former Goldsmith’s student can now count cinema critics and prestigious film festival juries among his many admirers, for his first foray into commercial cinema has produced a gripping and powerful film that is remarkable on many levels.

One the most impressive things about Hunger is how utterly compelling it manages to be while entirely eschewing many of the conventions of mainstream cinema. The structure represents a bold leap into virtually uncharted waters; seemingly important characters suddenly disappear without explanation when the film enters a new chapter; the first 40 minutes and the last half an hour contain virtually no dialogue, but bracket a central section that chatters away about morality and religion for 25 minutes.

We are obviously a long way from pretty much everything else you’re likely to find in the local megaplex this autumn, but then we were never going to get a straightforward drama from an artist whose most celebrated work to date was a film of him pushing an oil drum around the streets of Manhattan (artistically impressive but hardly Disney territory).

Hunger tells the story of IRA prisoner Bobby Sands’ (Michael Fassbender) 1981 hunger strike inside Maze Prison’s notorious “H-blocks”, with the narrative broken into three very distinct acts. The first shows the build up to the hunger strike and the prisoners’ prolonged dirty protest (smearing their faeces on the cell walls), though it is more of an evocative scene setter than an introduction to characters, an atmospheric slope that sucks the audience into this inhumane world. As an opening chapter it is incredibly effective at conveying the life of these prisoners, dumping us all amid the shit-smeared walls and piss soaked floors; a dark and depressing portrait that sharpens rather than smooths its edges, hanging interminably on the mundanity of confinement (one shot stays in close up of a prisoner moving his hand around a window grill, toying with an injured fly, for something close to two minutes), but then startling its audience at every turn with sudden eruptions of cacophonous violence. These then give way just as quickly to lingering silence; silence that is almost more terrible and unsettling.

The second act is the famed 22 minute real-time conversation between Sands and Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham), the vast majority taking place in one static shot. This alone is an audacious and exciting move on McQueen’s part, but the thrill of the scene and what makes such a long stationary shot of two people talking so enthralling and intense is the consummate skill of Fassbender and Cunningham. It is difficult to find fault in either of the perfectly measured performances, but Fassbender in particular is utterly mesmerising, holding your attention like he’s reached through the screen and grabbed you by the lapels.

You feel both exhausted and exhilarated coming out of this scene, the effect made more pronounced by the sudden cut in dialogue. After such an extended conversation, the absence of talking then hovers like a ghost over the taciturn final chapter. Fassbender’s performance becomes increasingly revelatory as we watch him portray Sands’ slow and painful but determined starvation, the actor himself having undergone a 10 week supervised fast to properly show the emaciated end of his character.

There is no gloss to cover the grim reality in McQueen’s brave, thoughtful and all-round exceptional debut feature. Much like the H-Bloc prisoners, Hunger audiences are given no where to hide on a relentlessly difficult cinematic journey.

This won’t be to everyone’s tastes, nor will the unconventional structure, or the fact that seemingly prominent characters disappear half way through the movie while an apparent bit-player becomes the sole focus. But these are, in fact, the defiant strengths of a film that I defy anyone not to be intensely moved - if not disturbed - by.

Bobby Sands may well be the role that propels the fantastic Fassbender into a much higher (ie Hollywood) profile. And Hunger will certainly establish McQueen’s status as a director, making him a great asset to British film as well as art.

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Did You Know? Michael Fassbender is currently filming Quentin Tarantino’s new World War Two feature Inglourious Bastards with Brad Pitt and Mike Myers (among others). He is also rumoured to be starring with Ray Winstone in a new film version of hit 70s TV show The Sweeney.

****

Director: Matteo Garrone

Starring: Marco Macor, Ciro Petrone, Toni Servillo, Salvatore Abruzzese, Salvatore Cantalupo

FILMS about the Mafia are 10 a penny. Good films about the Mafia are in far shorter supply, with the most famous and applauded examples usually focussing on the Italian American organisation - The Godfather, Goodfellas and so on if you need it spelling out.

It is quite possible that the excellent Gomorrah will become a classic Mafia movie of similar standing - it has already won the Grand Prix at Cannes - but it is as radically different from its Hollywood cousins as Leonard Cohen is from Leona Lewis; heartbreak might be a common theme but their style and sound are worlds apart.

The same is true for Gomorrah and its distance from the landmark mob movies that have, until now, defined the genre. Not only is Gomorrah set in Italy, specifically in Naples, but it is stark, brutal and uncompromising where its famed predecessors have been slick and finely polished. It is the vicious and ugly reality to The Godfather’s classy and romantic nostalgia.

The film opens in the harsh blue light of a tanning parlour, where several mobsters are basking under the oppressive blue rays while another has a manicure. These are hoods of the modern age, meterosexual Mafioso whose hands have to look immaculate before they get blood on them. Within minutes the chillingly inevitable executions begin and the bronzing mobsters are left slumped in the sun showers with bullet holes in their heads and necks, the camera panning round to survey the blue-lit carnage to the sound of cheesy Italian pop. We are a long way from emotive classical guitar and soaring orchestral themes, just as we are from the familiar “barbershop hit”.

This is the Mafia of today, and not just any Mafia but the Camorra, Naples’ infamously violent criminal organisation that operates as a series of warring clans rather than in the classical pyramid structure. As the film’s post-script tells us: “In Europe the Camorra has killed more than all other criminal organisations: 4,000 deaths in the last 30 years - one every three days.”

This is the world that Gomorrah presents, though it is not all violence; we are also shown the industrial-scale drug dealing, the infamous waste (mis)management - the pollution from which has had disastrous results on the health of the general population - and the way illegal money is then invested in legitimate business.

Most of all, the film shows us the grip the Camorra has on its society, how even the most well-meaning people are caught up in its merciless tentacles and how it is the expected and accepted career path for many youths.

One reviewer I have read compares the film to acclaimed US TV show The Wire. This might be a little overgenerous (there ain’t much in this world as good as The Wire), but you can see the point he is making.

Much like the TV show, Gomorrah presents a world that seems almost beyond help, where crime is not so much the alternative as the only choice for many young people. Again like The Wire, the film is based on an in-depth journalistic investigation (Roberto Saviano’s best-selling book Gomorrah), and chooses multiple characters to tell its story, rather than a central protagonist.

As such, a distinctive plot is thin on the ground, but the film is packed with striking and memorable scenes - a flash Mercedes ploughing off the road into an ornate classical sculpture garden (it’s, like, totally metaphorical and stuff), or two reckless teens firing rounds into the ocean from a cache of stolen weapons, clad only in their underpants.

My only real gripe would be that such characters don’t have the time to develop and evolve. Unlike The Wire, which has at least 12 one hour episodes in each of its five series, Gomorrah has to pack its narrative into a little over two hours. But my criticism is less an artistic judgement than a personal frustration, as the film consciously chooses to be more interested in society and culture than the individual stories of inhabitants. It is cinema as social study, and uses as many characters as necessary to open a window as wide as possible onto this world.

More than anything - and again like The Wire - Gomorrah tells it like it is. Shot in a handheld, docu-style to terrible Italian pop, the film shuns the conventions of its genre and our well-honed ideas about the mob; Gomorrah’s Mafioso are not husky-voiced family men but poorly dressed thugs, ruling over deprived estates; the many killings are sudden and brutal, the characters disposed of with little fanfare.

It is perhaps best put by a man who used to live in Naples and posted the following comment after a web review of the film: “Those who believe The Godfather is the way of the world in terms of organized crime should see this to get a feeling for what an ugly world it really is. There are no men of honour, just leaders and those who are misled. There is nothing worthwhile in this way of life and the best thing one can do is escape.”

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Did You Know? Journalist and author Robert Saviano, whose 2006 investigation of the Camorra the film is based on, received numerous death threats from the organisation after the book was published. The Italian Minister of the Interior has since granted him a permanent police escort to protect him from assassination.

***

Genre: Drama

Director: Mark Herman

Starring: Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, David Thewlis, Vera Farmiga, Rupert Friend

THE Boy In The Striped Pyjamas is not your average Holocaust story. Although set in and around a concentration camp, amid the ghastly goings-on that we know so well, neither John Boyne’s award-winning novel or its cinematic adaptation engage heavily in the horrors of their subject.

This is not say that they give us a glossy, light-hearted romp through mankind’s darkest hour (as ghastly as it sounds, it’s surely just a matter of time); simply that we are a long way from the uncompromising, full-frontal nastiness of Schindler’s List.

Rather, the film presents the Holocaust and all its gross inhumanity through implication and assumption, without, for the most part, showing or speaking of the events directly.

This probably sounds annoyingly cryptic, but is actually quite simple: The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas is told through the curious and naive eyes of a child, and thus lends a fresh, interesting and thought-provoking perspective to this well-documented subject.

Eight-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is the son of a high-ranking Nazi officer (David Thewlis) who is moved with his family from a comfortable Berlin posting to a desolate area many miles away, where Bruno has no one to play with. Peering through the trees out of his bedroom window, Bruno sees what he thinks is a farm, where the children and adults all wear striped pyjamas.

Defying the instructions of his mother (Vera Farmiga), Bruno goes exploring through the woods behind their isolated house, eventually coming to a barbed wire fence where he discovers a boy of the same age called Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), who is sat on the other side of the fence, dressed in striped pyjamas.

Though knowing it is forbidden, the pair grow fond of each other and strike up a friendship, regularly meeting on either side of the barbed wire; Bruno brings Shmuel food, they discuss their families, what happens inside the camp (Shmuel explains it’s not a farm though knows nothing of the final solution) and the situation that means they are supposed to hate each other.

It is a simple but broad and penetrating story that has been faithfully translated for the screen. There are points where TV movie twinges creep in, though cinematographer Benoit Delhomme’s skilled and graceful photography certainly enhances the adaptation.

Much like the book, the film quite deftly illustrates the confusion of a child forced to try and comprehend such unique circumstances - the point being that his innocent and relatively uncorrupted mind sees holes in the Nazi hatred that older, more “educated” minds are blind to.

And the relationship between the two boys is a touching one. Their innocence and lack of understanding is always tragic but often insightful and occasionally funny (in the darkest kind of way). After injuring himself on a swing, Bruno discovers that a concentration camp inmate who work’s in his family’s kitchen used to be a doctor, leading him to conclude that adults are foolish for not making up their minds about what they want to do in life. “He used to be a doctor but he gave it up to become a potato peeler,” Bruno says as if exasperated at the silliness of the perceived decision.

No doubt the audience knows the painful answers to all of Bruno’s wide-eyed questions and the grim realities that overshadow the two friends’ guesses and assumptions - about the foul-smelling smoke that pours from the camp’s giant chimneys and so on - but the film still forces a new perspective on its viewer.

Which is all well and good, but the lack of brutal reality does feel curious at times. None of the inmates look particularly malnourished or underfed, and the death camp in question is basically just a sun-drenched field with a bit of mangled concrete in one corner.

It’s not a vision that’s going to strike fear and despair into viewers, though the point is presumably to show a camp that won’t appal Bruno, allowing him to continue thinking the best of his father’s work.

A more pressing problem with the film, and one that irks me throughout, is that this powerful and emotive story never feels as compelling as it should. There were a few sniffling noses around me at the end of the screening, but I felt strangely unmoved - or, at least, not nearly as close to the kind of gut-wrenching emotion I felt it fair to expect in a film about friendship between Nazi and Jewish children during the Holocaust.

The cinema should have been like the hull of the Titanic by the closing credits; our eyes should have been redder than Teen Wolf’s. But sadly not. It’s hard not to feel a little cheated in this sense, but then, as I said, this is not your average Holocaust story.

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Did You Know? Rupert Friend initially turned down the role of fiery Nazi officer Lieutenant Kotler because the character “scared” him. “I mean, it’s not particularly flattering to be associated with a group of people who attempted to exterminate an entire race,” Friend said. “I’m not a shouty person, and I’m not violent either. The character scared me. But then I realised that that was probably the point. It was about putting a human face on these atrocities.”

***

Genre: Drama

Director: Saul Dibb

Starring: Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Charlotte Rampling, Dominic Cooper, Hayley Atwell

MYARGHHHH yawn, Keira Knightley, yawn, dressed up in period costume again, yawn, talking in a posh accent, yawn, about forbidden love, yawn, and other such guff, oh yawwwwwwwwn.

This seems a fairly standard response to any mention of The Duchess, Knightley’s new film which sees her returning to the 18th Century for the fifth time in as many years.

There have been grimaces and rolled eyes-a-plenty, as the young starlet’s penchant for corsets whips up a prevailing opinion that she has already made this film and played this role a thousand times before.

Is this fair? Not really, but prevailing opinions rarely blow the way of objective analysis and you can’t deny that she seems to favour a history flick (her next project is King Lear).

Of course, none of this can have helped sustain the delicate balance of yin and yang in The Duchess’ marketing department. Period dramas must be hard enough to sell already, but ones that come draped in pre-conceived veils of boredom and repetition must have the money men tearing their implants out.

So what do they do? They push, hype and herald the comparisons between the central character and her very distant descendent Princess Diana, creating the ridiculously blatant poster tagline “There were three people in this marriage” and sparking much-needed controversy by including Diana in the film’s trailer.

It might seem like a cheap shot but, to be fair, there are some interesting similarities. The beautiful and glamorous Georgiana Spencer (Knightley) is Diana’s great-great-great-great aunt, who at a young age marries the rich and powerful Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes) and quickly rises to unprecedented levels of celebrity, becoming a contemporary fashion icon and one of the most famous and beloved women of the day.

Their arranged marriage, however, is little more than a sham, devoid of passion and love and aggravated by the Duke’s relationship with Georgiana’s friend Lady Bess Foster (Hayley Atwell), who actually moves in with the couple. In turn, Georgiana’s enduring love for and subsequent affair with Earl Grey (Dominic Cooper) adds a final pinch of emotional torture and scandalous spice to the story, while making the Diana comparisons too easy to pass up.

With or without such obvious parallels, this is an interesting story that director Saul Dibb (Bullet Boy) has turned into a sturdy and watchable film. It’s not the most exciting thing you’ll see this year, or even this month, but it’s certainly not a bad effort, pleasingly filmed at a decent pace with some strong central performances.

Fiennes is superb as the detached and mean Duke, appearing more dislikeable than his turn as Voldemort yet never monochroming his character, always conveying that he is simply a product of his time. And, using the period’s archaic traditions to full effect, he also displays an unexpected flare for comic timing.

But it is Knightley’s film; she is the narrative and emotional centre, carrying the piece with one of her most impressive and demanding performances to date.

The film opens on the trail of her dress, panning upwards onto the back of her elevated wig as she walks through her family’s extensive grounds. After taking in some other fair maidens, the shot swings round to reveal Knightley’s exquisite face and barely leaves it from this point onwards.

Much of the film is spent in close-up on Knightley, scrutinising every pained lip-curl, every muted expression of aghast and despair, and she quite skilfully captures Georgiana’s development though the film.

I doubt it will be enough to bring her many naysayers around, but it is still a fine performance and deserves according recognition. She is a long way from being one of the nation’s best, but has grown impressively since her first foray onto that pirate ship, becoming both a worthy screen star and an asset to British film.

So hang in there Keira, the wider population will realise this sooner or later…though it might help if you branch out from corsets and aristocracy - I hear Guy Ritchie’s looking for a new muse.

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Did You Know? The Duchess is based on Amanda Foreman’s best-selling historical biography Georgiana, Duchess Of Devonshire, which won the 1998 Whitbread Prize for Best Biography.