Sunday
1917
Dir.
Sam Mendes, 2019, USA, War
For depicting a conflict as
unremittingly savage, fetid and unconscionably wasteful as World War One- 1917 emerges from its two hours of precisely placed muck
remarkably clean. Its trenches gleam with Hollywood polish, each helmet rim
tended to catch the light of the sun, each brutal wound and rotting corpse
flashed just long enough so the shock doesn’t catch its breath- and every
moment a mess of contrivances so performativley in-tune with the set path of
the camera that it’s almost impossible to believe they’re true. What great
respect 1917 pays to the casualties
of war in life it quickly loses in the gleaming absence of blood and
bitterness. Be it the whim of Director Sam Mendes, Cinematographer Rodger
Deakins or the executives behind its mid-mature rating- the film sees war
buffed up to a sickly shine add grave odds with the history of truth it’s now
long dead combatants shared.
From a technical standpoint it’s
been called ‘pure cinema’, but personally that honour comes from film merging
with life so seamlessly that you forget the world around you- rather than life lugging
fuel for film to spread its wings and be as pretty as possible. The terminal weight
slowly squeezing the reality of Mendes’ vision like the pincers of a vice is
the number of moments any film-maker not shackled to the gimmick would have cut.
1917 surrenders to its single-take
strategy so completely that creative intuition is throttled for the sake of
perpetuating the ruse, when all the film achieves by ignoring natural lulls in
its grand stage-act is pushing me further from its heart.
I was struck by the rousing beauty
of its night-time sequence shot in raging firelight, sparking bullets and
ghoulish flares by an Oscar-assured Rodger Deakins, as well as the last
extra-swamped act of bravery that finally married the film’s omnipresently bland
video-game score to something it could elevate, but at the same time I wondered
how a stronger script by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns could have endeared us
to these men before they bled out for the sake of a dramatic kick. The
considerable downtime afforded to the writers by its one-take nature was begging
for meaningful conversation with some light on the people paramount to carrying
this technical vessel beyond its embossed artifice but neither writer was able
to provide, isolating their main character too early and refusing them the
respite to let us learn what makes them tick. Reflecting on the film has
actually brought me back to Martin Scorsese’s infamous comments about
“theme-park” movies, which he later qualified as one-track rides that like Uncharted games control the flow of
action so tightly that they almost seem afraid to let go and allow their
characters time to breathe. So while it’s pretty and a genuine logistical
marvel two hours is too long for that immediate wonder to survive. In the end, 1917 makes a rollercoaster out of the First
World War.
I’ve seen some reviewers on
Letterboxd in particular decry themselves enemies of ‘long takes’ and decree
that the cut is the essence of film-making. All I can say is that art is a
universe in itself, infinite in possibility at any second, and there is nothing
more wasteful than restricting the ways it can find our heart. 1917 didn’t crack mine but its technical
tour-de-force trip into the endless possibilities of unfiltered life gives me
some hope that Mendes’ craft, however misguided, will inspire other film-makers
to embrace this technique that has traded between classic Hollywood pics like The Stranger to comparatively cult one-inch
barrier bastions like Mirror and Werckmeister Harmonies. It’s a sweeping
statement no doubt tempered by money more than creative control, but if mainstream
Western cinema’s grasp of the ‘long-take’ extended beyond showboating and into
the realms of Andrei Tarkovsky and Theo Angelopoulos, we’d be blessed with new
depths to language that has given us some of the greatest films ever made.
Let’s hope the success of films like 1917
and Birdman brings us closer to that artistic
sincerity, and don’t just reduce it to a selling point.