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Saturday, April 20, 2024
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HOLLYWOOD DUNKIRK
EDITOR'S PICK
'Dunkirk': Beyond any critical evaluation (Movie
Review By Subhash K Jha ; Rating:
*****)
A very strange incident occurred at the end my viewing of 'Dunkirk' in a packed
theatre. The audience clapped when the director's name appeared during the
end-credits.
This is a tribute to both the amazing magnetic attraction of the cinema of
Christopher Nolan, as well as the formidable reputation that his latest creation
has acquired within days of its release.
"Dunkirk" is much more than a war epic. To describe it as a masterpiece would be
inadequate. To not describe it as one would be unjust. There have been many
monumental works on the wages of war, but none that takes us so deep into the
bowels of battle .
The camera in "Dunkirk" is no more an objective eyewitness to the goings-on.
Abandoning all pretensions to objectivity Nolan and his extraordinary
Dutch-Swedish cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (who earlier shot Nolan's
outerspace gem Interstellar) penetrate right into the heart of the battle.
This is war. The World War 2, to be precise. Thousands of soldiers are stranded
off the coast of France on an island called "Dunkirk". This is the where the
action begins. There is no linear thought-process at work way, no way we can pin
down themes and plot points where we can applaud the director's vision. Damn,
Hans Zimmer's music is no help. The sounds Zimmer creates are that of pounding
peril and imminent catastrophe.
No matter what, "Dunkirk" won't romanticize war. Shivering shaking moaning in
nervousness and pain the soldiers only want to get home.
Nolan sweeps us into a saga so immense in its ramification, so profoundly
immersive that we are left with no choice but to be dragged along into a crisis
that we hope would never repeat itself. The narrative is non-linear. There is no
room in Dunkirk for cinematic niceties. And yet the film moves at a powerfully
persuasive momentum creating images of war's ravages which are like nothing
we've seen before except maybe in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan which
conveyed the same immediacy of war .
But "Dunkirk" goes beyond Saving Private Ryan. It moves from land to sea to air,
capturing the pain and catastrophe in swirling motion of selfabnegation. The
narrative surrenders to the actual incidents of evacuation to the extent that
the director no longer controls the plot. Nolan lets the crisis speakA for
itself.
AThe actors are not in this for fame. You would find it hard to recognize most
of them.There are no protagonists, only reluctant heroes. The ordeal of
evacuation and survival begins with a painfully young British soldier (Fion
Whitehead) dodging bullets and rushing to the shore where he encountersA
hundreds of soldiers waiting to be rescued.
If he wanted Nolan could have devoted himself to the task of creating epic
war-time images. He spares us the template pyrotechnics and focuses on trying
make sense of the absurdity and grotesquerie of wartime.
My favourite moments are on board that little boat that the brave and patriotic
Mr Dawson (Mark Rylance) manoeuvres towards Dunkirk to carry out his own private
rescue operations with his son (Tom Glyn Carney) and another boy with a
memorable face (Barry Keoghan) who wants to make himself useful.
In a narrative that has no time for or patience with sentimentality, there is a
moment of heartstopping poignancy when a very young man dies and the other
soldiers are told to be careful about not hurting him.
"But he's dead, mate," a soldier points out the obvious.
"That's why you need to be more careful."
When a culture and civilization buries the dead and moves on, it makes the same
mistakes over and over again.
"Dunkirk" tells us why we need a man of Christopher Nolan's vision to revisit
the grave errors of history.
Acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nolan's war drama "Dunkirk" won top sound honours at the 90th Academy Awards here.The film won the gold statue in -- Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing category.Gregg Landaker, Gary A. Rizzo and Mark Weingarten picked the Best Sound Mixing honour for the film, and Alex Gibson and Richard King took the Best Sound Editing trophy.It was a fourth win for Landaker, second for Rizzo and first for Weingarten.Read More
Harry Style overwhelmed by 'Dunkirk' settingSinger-actor Harry Styles was overwhelmed while working for his film "Dunkirk" as the place in real world witnessed a loss of thousands of lives during the Second World War.Read More
