Dunkirk is also the tale of refugees in 2017

The countdown has begun for Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated film to hit the cinemas. Fans and acolytes have already placed the director on a pedestal next to Stanley Kubrick. But let’s wait and see

More than two decades ago, a burglary in a London neighbourhood may have paved the way for one of the greatest cinematic journeys in Hollywood. Living in this rather crowded community, a young Christopher Nolan came to be increasingly interested in the idea of an individual amid the herd. What would be his, or her, story? The fact that his house was broken into around the same time seemed ominous. Upon close inspection of the broken door, Nolan realised that it was made of plywood and “that was never keeping anybody out. What was keeping people out were the social protocols that allow us to live together”. To a regular mind, this would be burglary. To Christopher Nolan, this was an idea. One that informed his first fulllength feature film Following (1998).

A few minutes into the film, the audience meets a thief, who is not as interested in stealing wealth as he is interested in snatching a slice of life away from his victims so that they can reassess their circumstances. In some ways, Nolan’s craft bears a kinship with the thief’s in its purpose. As a storyteller, he thrives on snatching the order — social, moral, psychological, even chronological — possibly to make the audiences reexamine the world as they may (or may not) know it.

No wonder then, the release of his new film Dunkirk has become the most anticipated event in the pop culture calendar this year. The frenzy is at its peak with many wondering if, with Dunkirk, Nolan would be granted the throne adjacent to Stanley Kubrick’s? Early reviews are unanimous in their praise of the film. Critics have assured us that Dunkirk catapults Nolan into a league of extraordinary greatness. As for that spot next to Kubrick’s, he may just have bagged that too with The Guardian noting, “…with

Dunkirk, Nolan may at last be able to walk the Kubrick walk. Most obviously because as a high-impact, morally scrupulous war film, Dunkirk bears direct comparison to Paths of Glory, Kubrick’s diamondhard fable of outrage from 1957”.

Dunkirk is a slice of World War II history that is incredibly close to the British heart (and given Nolan’s half-British lineage, may have inspired him as a storyteller). It is 1940 and the Allied Forces find themselves stranded on the Dunkirk beach as the threat of a German attack looms large. A special rescue mission, called Operation Dynamo, sees a flotilla of several hundred boats, including some privately owned ones, aiding the evacuation process. The film tells the story of war from, primarily, three different vantage points — a young soldier stranded on the beach, an old man and his son setting out on the mission on their boat despite a personal tragedy and an RAF pilot aiding the evacuation process.

With Dunkirk, the 46-year-old filmmaker forays into the genre of war films, and yet transcends it in many ways. No scene in the first half feels complete as an action from another site of mayhem intervenes. The technique facilitates a commentary on the chaos — in the process rewriting many rules of the genre.

Change has been a constant in his craft. Traditionally, no two Christopher Nolan films have had similar worlds, apart from the Batman trilogy, of course. Even as he inhabits these vastly different spaces — physically and psychologically, what has remained an underlying theme is a spectacle of uncertainty. Each film is an audio-visual puzzle for the audience to solve. Any emotion — grief, exhilaration, anger, fear, et al — will simply not be spelt out because, as he once told The Guardian, “a great film should be depressing, but the reason it is not is because we want the world to be more complicated than it is”.

A complicated world that enjoys the support of studios as well as the audiences!

As the film releases across the theatres on July 27, many cinephiles will be heading to the theatres to find out if it’s time they, too, anointed him the Stanley Kubrick of this generation! How lovely would it be, though, if we were to just celebrate him as the Christopher Nolan of our time! anamika@khaleejtimes.com Anamika is keenly interested in observing and recording thought and action

The film tells the story of war from three different vantage points — a young soldier stranded on the beach, an old man and his son setting out on the mission despite a personal tragedy and an RAF pilot aiding the evacuation process