Dunkirk

seen on 9 August 2017

Christopher Nolan directs Fionn Whitehead, Harry Styles, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy and many others in a film about the evacuation of 300,000 members of the British Army from the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940.

The soldiers were encircled by the German Army, while the Luftwaffe strafed he beaches and the destroyers attempting the seemingly hopeless task of transporting the men to England. Many small boats from the southern ports of England sailed across the Channel to help with the rescue, principally by ferrying men from the exposed beaches and piers to deeper waters where larger boats could accept them; but many also took men all the way back to England.

The film has three strands: following soldiers on 'the Mole' (principally the young men portrayed by Whitehead and Styles) over a period of a week; following one of the civilian boats captained by Mark Rylance aided by his son and another local teenager for a day; and following an RAF sortie led by Tom Hardy for an hour. These three strands are intertwined, and some elements of the overall narrative are presented in more than one strand as they intersect one another. The unusual juxtaposition of unequal time frames, a device used in some of Nolan's previous films in a science fiction context, here cleverly underscores both the chaos and the danger of the situation for all concerned. There is virtually no depiction of the enemy, apart from anonymous Luftwaffe planes, bombs and bullets, some fluttering propaganda leaflets, and some blurred figures who eventually take the pilot prisoner on the beach.

Eerie silence in the township at the beginning is suddenly, alarmingly, punctuated by gunfire, but for the young soldier the true enormity of the situation is only revealed when he reaches the beach and finds columns of men waiting, utterly exposed to the attentions of enemy aircraft. Though boarding a ship is perilous enough, success does not guarantee safety as a hospital ship is bombed and another destroyer torpedoed. 

In the meantime, the taciturn Mark Rylance takes his own boat out rather than allowing the Navy to commandeer it; one man he rescues (Cillian Murphy) is shell-shocked and desperately unwilling to face returning to the French coast. In the skies at the crucial moment when many small boats are approaching, the pilot Tom Hardy engages in as many dogfights as he can while unable to tell how much fuel he has since his gauge is broken.

For much of the film nothing is glorified, but neither is the violence needlessly exploitative. The inaction is as disturbing as the sudden irruptions of danger, and the gathering tension is superbly enhanced by a dramatic score (by Hans Zimmer) in which, for example, the rhythms of shipboard motors blend seamlessly into driving percussive effects. Only the soaring cadences of Elgar's 'Nimrod' variation, saved from bombast by an orchestration in keeping with the rest of the score, transform the music to a more emotional plane.  The technical feats of flying and aerial combat are conveyed with virtually no attention to personality; the father and son on their boat are not talkative but the older man evinces a steely determination; the soldiers are fearful and demoralised, caught almost unawares in horrible moral choices as they struggle to survive.

The cast is excellent, the cinematography handling both the large vistas of sky, sea and beach, and the close not to say claustrophobic confines of boats and aircraft under fire, and the overall effect, especially in a large cinema projecting film stock rather than digital copy, is really powerful.

The young soldiers assume they will be derided as failures when they reach home, and so are non-plussed by the cheers of strangers waiting to greet them; one of them reads out Churchill's famous speech from a newspaper report to his comrade in a railway carriage, the means by which it must have reached so many of the returning men, so that the film succeeds in avoiding the nostalgic patriotism that has washed over these events in subsequent years.

Very, very impressive.