The Childhood of a Leader
Dir: Brady Corbet 1hr 55mins (12A)
Disturbing allegory of the rise of fascism
★★★
Loosely based on Jean-paul Sartre’s short story about a troubled boy seduced by fascism, The Childhood of a Leader is set in France in 1919, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. “But its electrifying, almost clairvoyant relevance to the immediate present touches you like an icy finger on the back of your neck.” The “tyrant in waiting” in actor Brady Corbet’s stunning directorial debut is Prescott (Tom Sweet), a young American boy whose angelic looks belie his monstrous character. Prescott’s father (Liam Cunningham) is a member of the US delegation seeking to impose a peace deal on the vanquished Germans during negotiations at Versailles; and all the adults around the child talk about the need to reject anger and embrace forgiveness, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. But Prescott, a strongwilled boy whose various tantrums provide the staging posts in the film’s plot, learns that power lies in the opposite direction. Dark and enigmatic, the film is mainly set in a gloomy old manor house outside Paris, and has a magnificent orchestral score by 1960s pop star Scott Walker, said Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent. There are “longueurs”; and it often “feels more a case study than a drama”. But its “sombre power” is “only accentuated by its elliptical narrative style”.
The novelist Mark Haddon selects six of his favourite audiobooks. His latest book, the short-story collection The Pier Falls, is available from Jonathan Cape at £16.99.
Beowulf 800-1100 AD, translated and read by Seamus Heaney (Faber £8.95). That rare thing: a translation of a masterpiece that is also a masterpiece. After listening to it for the first time I decided to listen to it all over again, not least because Heaney’s voice is a thing of wonder.
Paradise Lost by John Milton, 1667, read by Anton Lesser, Laura Paton and Chris Larkin (Naxos £13.99). I was driving regularly between Oxford and London when I listened to this. Those long Latinate sentences with their knotty syntax and subclauses like Russian dolls require concentration. At times I
emerged from the poem to find myself driving at 70mph on a busy motorway. Glorious.
Emma by Jane Austen, 1815, read by Juliet Stevenson (Naxos £29). Emma Woodhouse is one of the most lovably infuriating heroines in the whole of English literature. And Juliet Stevenson is Austen’s best reader by a country mile.
Moby-dick by Herman Melville, 1851, read by Frank Muller (Recorded Books £4.95). I read it and wasn’t seduced; then I listened to it and fell in love. There are longueurs in Melville’s novel, but the last third contains
passage after passage that rival Shakespeare for sheer poetry.
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, 1859, read by Glen Mccready and Rachel Bavidge (Naxos £46). Skulduggery, extortion, doppelgangers, sinister secrets, and the obese Count Fosco with his pet mice and canaries. This is a fine romp from beginning to end.
Bleak House by Charles Dickens, 1853, read by Sean Barrett and Teresa Gallagher (Naxos £55). Gallagher and Barrett are so good at what Dickens called “doing the police in different voices” I feel like I’m being read to by a cast of hundreds.