From the disaster of Dunkirk, a triumph of a movie
THe mass evacuation of Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in the early summer of 1940 has received pretty scant cinematic attention down the decades, unlike D-Day four years later.
Writer- director Christopher Nolan’s unconventional but gripping film helps, magnificently, to redress the balance.
Its main achievement, contrary to some over-excited reports, is not to offer proof that the One Direction boy-band star Harry Styles, making his screen debut, can really act.
Rather, it is to show why a French place- name that has become synonymous with British stoicism (read enough reports of townsfolk battling against rising floodwaters, for example, and it won’t be too long before you come across the evocative phrase ‘ Dunkirk spirit’) more accurately represents what Winston Churchill called a ‘colossal military disaster’.
Churchill’s famous bulldog exhortation to fight on the beaches, in the fields and the streets, was delivered in response to Dunkirk. But the same speech included the declaration that ‘wars are not won by evacuations’. Nolan uses that line as his mantra. From the film’s first frame to its last, there is never any doubt that we are witnessing something catastrophic.
In that context it’s not Dunkirk’s doughty heroism that is most moving – though there is plenty of it, not least from Mark Rylance as one of the many civilian skippers who sailed their little boats across the Channel to help the evacuation effort – but the vivid depiction of an intense will to live, against seemingly insuperable odds.
I was moved to actual tears twice, once when an elderly blind man, back in Blighty, welcomes home the bedraggled returning soldiers by telling them ‘ well done’. But all they did, one of them responds, was survive.old man. ‘That’s enough,’ says the
My tear ducts were also pricked when Kenneth Branagh’s naval commander first spots salvation in the form of all those fishingboats and pleasure craft.
Yet the film does not feel manipulative. Indeed, Nolan could have made more of his opening shot of the rescuing flotilla. It could have been breathtaking; thousands of boats bobbing all the way to the horizon. But he keeps it real, with a suitably motley but relatively small advance fleet. Astutely, Nolan also offers us a series of small, personal dramas rather than any overall narrative thread, which I suppose is precisely what war is.
SO there are no scenes with Churchill and his top brass back in Whitehall trying to orchestrate what was known, somewhat grandiosely for a seat- of-the-pants exercise, as Operation Dynamo. Nolan is far more intent on evoking the frantic chaos of a week in which, yes, around 338,000 Allied soldiers were rescued, but some 68,000 were lost.
There is a strong sense, which even the best war films sometimes fail to convey, of nobody quite knowing what’s going to happen next. Nolan communicates this, rather daringly considering his heavyweight cast, by keeping dialogue to a minimum. Hans Zimmer’s thrilling score, and Hoyte van Hoytema’s rousing cinematography, tell the story just as eloquently as any words. At times, there is an almost documentary realism to proceedings, which won’t please everyone, but held me spellbound. The film is presented from three perspectives – from land, sea and air – each within a different time frame. The fate of a small bunch of Tommies unfolds over a week. Oneby Styles,of them whois played, reportedly splendidly,auditioned without Nolan having the slightest idea who he was, but whose presence should tempt youngsters in to see this film. Let’s hope so. Perhaps they’ll even realise that ‘one direction’ has a much more solemn meaning when applied to Dunkirk. Meanwhile, the sea rescue takes place over a day, and a night. And the bravery of a Spitfire pilot (Tom Hardy, who gets all of about ten lines, most of them muffled) is condensed to an hour. The film is not without flaws; for all its period accuracy, I’m pretty sure I spotted a TV aerial jutting off a roof in the town of Dunkirk. And I can imagine some audiences feeling deprived by the lack of clear narrative momentum. But, like Nolan’s last feature, 2014’s Interstellar, it is a dazzling spectacle that demands to be seen on the silver screen. Nolan shot it using 65mm film, which is rare these days, but gives his film the visual scope of old-fashioned epics such as Ben-Hur. Dunkirk, too, is indubitably epic. Dunkirk opens on Friday.