Things have changed: Parasite triumphs at the 2020 Oscars

Parasite went into the 92nd Academy Awards with six nominations. Three of those were for director Bong Joon-ho. No South Korean film had been nominated for an Oscar before this. No non-English language film had ever won best picture.

It was supposed to be the night of 1917 and Joker. Yet somehow, a savagely funny Korean film about class divisions ran away with the night’s top honours. And Bong Joon-ho, a world cinema star but hardly a household name outside cinephile circles, went home with three personal Oscars, for original screenplay, director and best picture (he’s one of the producers), plus a fourth trip to the stage to pick up best international feature (which, bizarrely, is awarded to the submitting country, not an individual).

Parasite was already a Palme d’Or winner, but Cannes films are supposed to be content with foreign language Oscars. Bong winning over Tarantino and Mendes and Scorsese is a signal to the filmmaking world that a long-closed door has been kicked open. It may slam shut next year – let’s remember that last year, a mediocre American film, Green Book, won the top prize over a superior foreign one, Roma – but it’s still a much-needed acknowledgment from the Academy that the best film of the year isn’t always in English.

The ceremony badly needed the kick of history in the making. Apart from Bong’s trips to the stage, this was one of the most desultory Oscars in recent memory (which is saying something). There was no host, like last time – just a line of presenters offering nervous jokes and trying not to mispronounce nominee names. A few seemed to have been sent out with instructions to shock the audience (like Ray Romano saying “fuck" for no particular reason), but mostly they were just awkward, from a rambling Tom Hanks talking about a selfie museum to Rebel Wilson and James Corden in fur costumes making fun of their own film, Cats.

That this was your dad’s Oscars became clear when Eminem came on to perform ‘Lose Yourself’, a track from the 2002 movie 8 Mile. This was plainly an attempt to reach out to the kids who won’t watch the Oscars anymore – and a clear sign that the Academy has no idea what kids today are listening to. Unfortunately, they doubled down on the hip-hop, with rapper Utkarsh Ambudkar recapping the ceremony in rhyme, a moment of forced diversity so uncomfortable even the well-heeled attendees weren’t sure how to react.

Lead acting honours went according to form, Joaquin Phoenix picking up a statue for Joker and Renee Zellweger winning for her role as Judy Garland in Judy. Supporting actor trophies went to two popular turns, Brad Pitt for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Laura Dern in Marriage Story. Jojo Rabbit won adapted screenplay; Parasite’s win for original screenplay was the first sign that this was going to be a big night for the film. The technical awards went the way of 1917 (best cinematography for Roger Deakins, sound mixing and visual effects) and Ford v Ferrari (editing, sound design).

Amidst all the painfully sincere stump speeches, there were moments of genuine feeling: Deakins thanking his key grip, gaffer and focus puller; best documentary winner Julia Reichert acknowledging that some of her fellow nominees literally risked their lives to make their films; Hildur Guðnadóttir, the first female best score winner in 23 years, opening with “This is so touching". The image everyone will take away, though, is of Bong on stage, after he's said thanks for the original screenplay win. As his co-writer, Han Jin-won, speaks, he turns and gazes at his statuette, laughing lightly, as if he can’t believe where he’s reached. A couple of hours later, he’ll make history.

This piece appeared in Mint.

‘Parasite’, the Oscars and one-inch barriers

Bong Joon-ho has been making films for 20 years. Along with countrymen Park Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk and Hong Sang-soo, the South Korean is one of the defining directors of the last two decades. Several of his films, which include Memories Of Murder, Mother and Okja, have made best-of-year and best-of-decade lists. Yet, Hollywood is behaving like it just heard of him yesterday.

Bong has been living a charmed life since May, when Parasite won the Palme d’Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. Other festival appearances followed, then the US release. In the last couple of months, he and the cast have been touring with the film. And Hollywood can’t seem to get enough of them. Parasite has snapped up critics’ circle and guild awards across the country, the line “Jessica, only child, Illinois, Chicago" is a rare cinephile meme, it has won a Golden Globe for best non-English film, and garnered an unprecedented six Oscar nominations, for best picture, director, international feature film, original screenplay, editing and production design.

What lies behind Hollywood’s crush on Bong? It is partly because of the kind of films he makes—ostensibly “genre movies", slick, funny, not alienatingly foreign or arty. His darkly comic tone was in place from his first feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000). It was his second film, though, which announced him to the world as an uncommon talent. Memories Of Murder (2003) is based on an actual case (in the news recently for finally being solved) of a serial killer in late 1980s South Korea. Bong’s caustic tone and command over compositional tension raise it far above a standard procedural. Had he directed Mother (2009) next, he might have been pegged as the Korean David Fincher, but he swerved instead, directing a delirious and distinctive creature feature, The Host (2006).

Still, Hollywood has only opened its arms to Bong because it knew him from before. After four films in South Korea, he directed Snowpiercer (2013) in English; it had an American star, Chris Evans, in the lead, and was distributed there by The Weinstein Company. His next, Okja (2017), was in English and Korean, produced by Netflix and Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Neither was quite as brilliant as his Korean films, yet it’s unlikely Parasite would have been enjoying the same success if they hadn’t happened.

Last year, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, in Mixtec and Spanish, was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, and won for director, foreign film and cinematography. Taken together, Roma and Parasite might be taken as a sign of the Academy’s increasingly open attitude to foreign cinema (though Roma was produced by Netflix, making it at least a little American). While it’s true that they are letting a select few in through the door now, the same caveat applied in Cuarón’s case as Bong’s. He has directed more English films than Mexican ones, including a big franchise feature (Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban) and a best director Oscar-winner (Gravity). By the time he came around to making his intensely personal black and white film, Hollywood saw Cuarón as one of them, not some intimidating foreign genius.

Parasite opens with the Kims, a family of four—Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin) and their children, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) and Ki-jung (Park So-dam)—in their one-room “semi-basement". It’s a cramped, hardscrabble existence, but the Kims are all talented hustlers, and Ki-woo has a plan. First, he gets a job at a mansion tutoring a wealthy couple’s daughter. He then lays the ground for his sister to work with the couple’s young son (the scene where Ki-jung, entirely unqualified, sells the boy’s mother on “art therapy" is a comic gem). Soon, all four are working under the same artistically designed roof, pretending to have never met each other.

Just watching these four run rings around their shallow employers would have made for a funny, acidic variation on the home invasion thriller. But the film, like Ki-woo, has a grand plan. The mansion’s original housekeeper, Gook Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun), who was removed after an elaborate scheme by the interlopers, turns up on a stormy night. In a breathtakingly dark reveal, it turns out her husband has been living beneath the building, in a basement the owners never visit. His wife sneaks him food once a week—a supply that was cut off when she was fired. Now she knows their secret, they know hers, and Bong starts tightening the screws. All six are sympathetic characters but do horrible things—there’s no room for niceties when you are at the bottom of the societal chain. And so Parasite goes from a dark comedy about class to a horror film about class warfare.

Parasite is best considered in a double bill with another stunning Korean film. Lee Chang-dong is a very different film-maker from Bong, elliptical and poetic rather than wickedly smart, but Burning (2018) is as devastating a look at class divisions as Parasite. When a young woman disappears, her former classmate (and briefly, her lover), a solidly middle-class writer, becomes obsessed with the idea that her last boyfriend, a rich Gatsby-like aesthete, is somehow responsible. Both films explode into shocking violence, which suggests that even sensibilities as far apart as Bong and Lee reached the same conclusion: The class war, when it comes, will be ugly and messy, and the side that’s more desperate will prevail.

A couple of months before Bong’s film won the 2019 Palme d’Or, the best picture Oscar went to Green Book, a film even American critics had to admit was terrible. Parasite may only be in with the slimmest of chances on Oscar night, but it’s almost inconceivable that two films with such a gulf in artistry could be up for, let alone win, the same award. Year after year, a bunch of serviceable American films and a few standouts are pitted against each other and the film world pretends the discussion is about honouring the best of the year. Yet, hardly a year goes by when the best film isn’t made outside America and England.

South Korean film has changed the language of world cinema in the last two decades, especially in its approach to genre cinema (though there’s also the auteurist innovations of Kim Ki-duk and Hong Sang-soo). Three-four of the best-known directors working in global cinema today are from there. Yet, Parasite is the first South Korean film to ever be nominated for an Academy award. It’s a measure of how even the foreign language category of the Oscars misses entire seismic shifts in world cinema.

Every year, there are anonymous reports of Academy voters skipping non-English films because they don’t want to keep track of subtitles. Upon winning for best non-English film at the Golden Globes in January, Bong told the audience through a translator: “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of foreign language subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films." The Oscars need Bong more than he needs them.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge a few days before the Oscars, where, against all odd, Parasite won Best Picture. 

Jawaani Jaaneman: Review

Jawaani Jaaneman does something clever in its first scene. Nitin Kakkar’s film begins with Jaswinder (Saif Ali Khan) dancing to a reworked version of “Ole Ole". Every other Hindi film nowadays has a rebooted 90s track, but this is Saif dancing on an old Saif song. Jaswinder—Jazz, as he likes to call himself— might be in perpetual adolescence but viewers of a certain vintage, ones who saw Yeh Dillagi in the theatre, will feel the passage of time and recognize the tinge of desperation in his footloose ways.

Kakkar and screenwriters Hussain Dalal and Abbas Dalal don’t let up on the 90s references. Khan dances to the delectably cheesy Govinda number "Husn Hai Suhana". Chunky Pandey shows up from time to time as a similarly adolescent player. And when Jazz, trying on shades, is compared to Feroz Khan, he responds with “Fardeen" – an inexplicable downgrade.

The film turns when 21-year-old Tia (Alaya F) spills her drink on Jazz at a nightclub and, when he brings her back to his bachelor pad, reveals that he might be her father. Tia’s mother and him had once hooked up in Amsterdam; unbeknownst to him, it resulted in a child. Jazz takes the news as well as you’d imagine someone who calls himself Jazz would take it – but like young Nicholas Hoult inserting himself into Hugh Grant’s carefree life in About a Boy, Tia is sweetly persistent.

Tia turning out pregnant with her boyfriend’s baby, and receiving the news at the same time they confirm Jazz is her father, is a touch gimmicky. And too much is made of Jazz’s hard-nosed business dealings as a real estate agent aligning with his man-child behaviour; we know he’ll eventually have to fix one to right the other. But the material is made most palatable by Khan – unquestionably the best Hindi film actor when it comes to playing urbane, quick-witted types – and Alaya, who keeps Tia’s wholesomeness from grating even though she’s made to say things like “Maine itni khushi pehle mehsoos nahi ki (I’ve never experienced happiness like this before)".

Tabu turns up late in the proceedings as Tia’s hippie mother. It’s an amusing cameo – she calls Jazz a sambhog-addict – though there’s a strange scene where she pretty much forces herself on her co-parent. Having set itself up nicely in the first hour, Jawaani Jaaneman finds itself with little to say in the second. It seems to regard single people in their 30s and 40s – anyone who isn’t into “old school love", as Jazz’s hairdresser friend (Kubbra Sait) puts it – as unmoored and unhappy: a conservative slant to an otherwise open-minded film.

I’ll end with a plea. It’s time for Indian film directors to stop inserting musical stings before punchlines. If it’s funny, they’ll laugh. The music is a sign you think they won’t.

This review appeared in Mint.

Style necessitates: Delayed Rays of a Star

Amanda Lee Koe’s novel takes its title from a line in a Roland Barthes essay, in which he describes the radiation from a photograph touching the viewer “like the delayed rays of a star". In this case, the light emanating is from a publicity still of Leni Riefenstahl, Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich, taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt in 1928 in Berlin. Koe follows this diffused beam across time, expertly using it to illuminate little corners of the 20th century.

Though the two Germans would soon eclipse her fame, Wong was the biggest star in the photograph, having played Tiger Lily in Peter Pan and starred opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad. Riefenstahl was then an actor, known for her nature films; she would soon catch the eye of Hitler and turn to film direction. And Dietrich wasn’t a star at all, still two years away from Josef von Sternberg unleashing her distinct brand of smoky sexuality in The Blue Angel.

With the photograph as a jumping-off point, Koe proceeds to make dizzying leaps across time and space. After starting in Berlin, we’re suddenly in Paris, with Dietrich as a cantankerous, elderly recluse; next we’re in China, following the journey of her maid, Bébé. In one stunning chapter, we follow a wolf from a forest in Czechoslovakia to the Leipzig zoo to the sets of a film Riefenstahl is shooting in the Bavarian Alps. Sternberg is moved to tears by a noh performance in a Tokyo monastery. A Smiths fan attends a Joy Division gig in London and serves David Bowie drinks in a Paris bar.

Despite its expansive canvas, Delayed Rays trips lightly and confidently from incident to incident, character to character. Much of what happens in the book is anchored in fact, but the embellishments are Koe’s. A meeting between Wong and German critic Walter Benjamin is imagined over the space of a chapter. As I ran into one obtuse word after another, I realized with delight that Koe’s prose had taken on the qualities of Benjamin’s fussy language (“he found himself unwilling to verbalize to her how the extemporaneous interpolation of various spheres of her being…"). Later, a winding sentence describing Sternberg’s travels in Asia has the same exotic detailing as the director’s films.

In a 2017 interview, Koe said that shuttling between her native Singapore and New York felt like “a split existence". “I guess when you’re away you always see the other thing more clearly. So it is interesting to have that dual perspective as well." Whether by design or not, Delayed Rays abounds in dualities. Dietrich—German but also American; lover of men and women—is described by Sternberg (himself suspended between American and faux-Continental) as having a “lust for bothness". Wong is American, but in the eyes of Hollywood she’s Chinese, forced to adopt Oriental clichés. Riefenstahl’s biggest supporter is Hitler and her funder the Nazi government, but she thinks of herself as an apolitical artist, pure (hearing this last descriptor from Hitler’s mouth is chilling).

Though Delayed Rays is mostly concerned with fame in the first half of the 20th century, several of the issues it grapples with are bracingly modern. Riefenstahl practically begs us to separate the art from the artist, to call her a genius for Olympia (completely deserved) but gloss over Triumph of the Will’s deification of Hitler. She also corrects a reporter who calls her the first female film-maker, saying she’s just a film-maker. Then there’s the matter of representative casting in Hollywood. More than half a century before Scarlett Johansson became a meme, the part of O-Lan in the adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth went to a white woman. Wong, for whom the part seems tailor-made, is deemed “too Chinese to play a Chinese" by the studio.

Koe writes beautifully about cinema and its effects. If you haven’t seen Shanghai Express, I would recommend watching two isolated scenes from the film, both of which are on YouTube. The first is a comic one, with Dietrich putting down a supercilious woman, and Wong joining in with the punchline. The second is even more thrilling, an action scene with an erotic charge. Koe imagines how these must have unfolded on set, with the autocratic Sternberg (Dietrich’s lover) and the two stars, also lovers once (in the book at least). Elsewhere, Sternberg tells Riefenstahl that cinema is “time on the axis of sight", a description so perfect that it sounds like it came from the real Sternberg, though it’s probably Koe writing in Sternberg’s voice.

When Riefenstahl is called by Hitler for a final meeting, he asks her for a favour. She’s surprised to learn that even with defeat imminent, he’s concerned about the unreliability of film stock and would like her to work on a more durable material after the war. That Koe finds a way to make Hitler a film preservationist is the sort of unexpected delight this book regularly passes on from writer to reader. Style never hesitates, we’re told at one point. Style necessitates. Koe finds her style from the start, and never looks back.

This review appeared in Mint Lounge.

Street Dancer 3D: Review

The hidden cost of Prabhu Deva dancing is Prabhu Deva saying things. The owner of a London restaurant, he’s trying to get rival Indian and Pakistani dance crews to team up. “In physics, two negatives make a positive," he says. A point well taken, but Anna isn’t done. “In economics, it’s better to share profits than suffer losses alone. In moral science, we are told that united we stand, divided we fall. In history, the foreigners only left India once we all came together."

In screenwriting, this is called a Farhad Samji. In time, two-and-a-half hours were spent. In all honesty, after ABCD, ABCD 2 and this, I feel like I’ve seen enough Remo D’Souza dance films for one lifetime.

For Varun Dhawan to dance, family must suffer. Having performed for the memory of his departed mother in ABCD 2, he’s dancing for his injured brother in Street Dancer 3D. After the elder sibling takes a bad fall in the finale of a major dance tournament, Sahej vows to win it for him. He reassembles Street Dancers, a crew of Indian-origin dancers in London. Their rivals, the Pakistani-origin Rule Breakers, led by Inayat (Shraddha Kapoor), are eyeing the same prize. It’s all fun and games and competitive cricket-watching until the refugee crisis rears its head.

Late one night at Anna’s restaurant, Inayat finds out he’s been feeding immigrants from the subcontinent who live in a nearby tunnel. Sahej’s conscience is also under siege: four Punjabi musicians he brought to London under false pretences for a fee have fallen on hard times. It’s a strange feeling to go from breaking and twerking to homeless Indians and Pakistanis narrating their sad stories, but D’Souza is obviously moved by their plight, and by the charitable work of the Sikh Welfare & Awareness Team, who get a shout-out at the end. It’s an irony beyond the scope of this film concerned with the well-being of Indian immigrants abroad that it’s releasing as the country fights over the rights of immigrants in India.

As for the dancing itself, it’s expertly done and entirely boring. The joy of dance is replaced by the inaccessibility of gymnastics, the thrill of bodies in motion dulled by the monotony of choreography. To see Prabhu Deva perform a new version of “Muqabala" is to feel intensely nostalgic for the ‘90s, a time when dancing in Indian films was either impressive or terrible but wasn't presented with the seriousness of a military manoeuvre. At least the dancing is professional – the brief horror of Dhawan’s British accent is revenge for the Kohinoor.

Lesser movies offer advice; Street Dancer 3D offers advice that rhymes. “Confidence thrills, overconfidence kills," Anna informs Inayat. She in turn tells Sahej: “We dance to express, you dance to impress." This film exists neither to impress nor express but to oppress and distress.

This review appeared in Mint.

Panga: Review

For such an unhurried film, Panga has a bracingly violent start. All of Bhopal is sleeping, except for Prashant (Jassie Gill), who’s getting kicked by his wife, Jaya (Kangana Ranaut), in bed. These aren’t light kicks either. Ranaut isn’t an actor given to half-measures and I’d wager Gill left the set that day with more than a few bruises. Not only are the kicks satisfyingly hard, they have a certain rhythm and coil to them. They’re athlete kicks.

It’s a nice detail, because Jaya is an athlete, or at least was one. A national-level kabaddi player, she quit the sport to take care of her son, born prematurely and with low immunity. She never returned to kabaddi, working instead at a railway ticket counter and investing all her energy in her precocious school-going child and loving husband. She feels a pang now and then, but tells herself that neither her umar (age – she’s 32) nor kamar (waistline) would allow a return to the game.

In Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s first film, 2016's Nil Battey Sannata, a working mother joins her daughter’s school so she can first learn and then tutor her in math. Panga, too, has a mother risking embarrassment for her child: once the boy learns that Jaya left kabaddi for him, he badgers his father to persuade her to make a comeback. In a montage scored with an Annu Kapoor comic number, Jaya starts training again, with the intention of giving up in a month. But when the time comes, she can’t. She left kabaddi, but kabaddi never left her.

It’s barely a surprise when the super-supportive Prashant – an endearing, if slightly wishful, creation – insists she try and make her way back to the national team. Tiwari and co-writer Nikhil Mehrohtra carefully unpeel the various levels of social indoctrination that someone like Jaya must overcome before they can follow their dreams, not only practical problems (Prashant is inept around the house) but her own guilt at what in her mind amounts to abandoning her child.

For a sports film, this is a timely idea to be grappling with (Sultan, in 2016, also dealt with it). There are more prominent Indian women athletes today than perhaps ever before, and some like Mary Kom and Sania Mirza have returned to their sports after becoming parents. But in a more general sense, the film is an empathetic look at the social cost of continuing with one’s life after marriage and children. That Jaya should consider herself lucky – that she actually is lucky, as she’s told by several women – to get to do the thing she’s good at, is one of the more poignant reiterations of this film.

Nitesh Tiwari is credited with additional dialogue and screenplay, and there’s a hint of Dangal’s unnecessary villain in the figure of national team captain, who for no reason keeps slighting Jaya. I can see why the film tries to introduce a late-stage antagonist, though; Panga is easy-going to a fault. It’s not often one gets to say this about a Hindi film, but there are moments when it could really use some drama. The kabaddi isn’t badly executed but because the film takes its time building to Jaya’s comeback, the final championship is both rushed and predictable.

After a series of high-strung, if often brilliant, performances in Rangoon, Simran, Manikarnika and Judgmentall Hai Kya, it’s a relief to see Ranaut play in a more down-to-earth style. Jaya is more comfortable in her skin than Rani Mehra, but Queen does come to mind: it’s the same homemade-sweater-wearing, chaat-eating, cautiously progressive middle-class milieu. Gill does little but look lost and smile broadly – a surprisingly winsome strategy. Richa Chadha, in a very Richa Chadha role as an outspoken coach and friend of Jaya’s, is supremely relaxed. She even gets to do a little shout-out to her own line from Gangs of Wasseypur: “Ghoor kaahe rahe ho?" The best adaptation of a famous line, though, is by a character who’s there in just one scene, the doctor who tells Jaya, “Ab goli kha".

This review appeared in Mint.

1917: Review

A couple of days ago, Rian Johnson tweeted that Sam Mendes told him how, when they were shooting 1917, if anyone made a mistake they’d go right back to the beginning. The second part of the tweet made it clear Johnson was having a little fun: “They paid Cumberbatch to show up every day and wait in that room… He was there 6 months." Still, there’s something about this that cuts to the heart of the discourse surrounding 1917 and our tendency to appreciate certain films not for how they turn out but for how they were made.

Sam Mendes’ World War I film is designed to seem like it’s a single continuous shot. There’s one obvious cut, when the screen goes black and a few hours pass in seconds; there are probably several more ‘invisible’ joins. But it shouldn’t matter if the film is one shot, or two, or a dozen. The question, rather, might be: What are the artistic dividends offered up by telling this particular story in a continuous-seeming shot? Johnson’s vision of the crew restarting if someone made a mistake may not have been true for 1917, but Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) and Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria (2015) were actually shot this way. Both, to my mind, are superior to 1917, not because they are ‘purer’ but because both transfer more successfully the exhilaration of the long take into their breathless narratives.

The film begins with lance corporals Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Will Schofield (George MacKay) slumbering in a field in France. They’re woken and told to report to General Erinmore (Colin Firth), who orders them to hand-deliver a letter to a battalion not far away, about to launch an attack on German forces who they think are on the run but have actually made a tactical retreat and are lying in wait for the British. The attack will result in the loss of 1600 men, one of whom is Tom’s brother. It’s practically a suicide mission, but Tom and Will have no choice but to set off, across fields strewn with bodies and the detritus of battle.

1917 is a remarkable technical achievement. A continuous shot is a challenge to map out and execute even when it’s a couple of characters in a closed space. To do so with the backdrop of war, with a hundred moving parts at any given moment, is an almost imaginable level of difficulty (Birdman, with fewer pieces to move around, took its stitched-up long takes to a Best Picture Oscar in 2015). Nevertheless, a viewer shouldn’t have to laud a film because it was an obstacle course for its makers. Beyond the difficulty of achieving the impression of a single shot, 1917’s accomplishments seem slight.

Imagine 1917 as a traditionally cut film and its flaws become easier to spot. The writing, by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, is strictly functional: a century of distance from WWI should be enough to come up something more lucid than “There is only one way this war ends. Last man standing." Placing interesting speech in the mouths of characters who aren’t well-spoken or are pressed for time isn’t too much to ask for – but the film’s betting everything on its near-constant movement.

It’s almost as if the novelty of technique pushed the makers to seek tradition in other places. The British are brave and stoic, the one French character is helpless and grateful, there’s even a virtuous Sikh soldier, but the German character repays kindness with desperate violence, as if it’s in their blood. There’s a war-film-by-numbers feel to some of the scenes, like when Will stumbles upon the French girl and the baby she’s taking care of. He sings a lullaby, gives them his food; she theatrically says “Don’t go" when he’s leaving. The sequence after that – a dazzling night-time run through the ruins of a bombed-out building – obliterates the memory of the scene; it was only later that I realized its awkwardness reminded me of the Peanuts strip where Snoopy, in his flying ace avatar, is offered shelter and soup by a French girl.

In an interview to Vox, Mendes said the film wasn’t designed to draw attention to itself. “I don’t really want people to think about the camera. If you’re aware of it for the first 10 minutes, then hopefully thereafter you forget about it, and you just watch the story." I can’t speak for anyone else but I often found my thoughts straying to Roger Deakins' camera and the planning that was making its spectacular runs possible. Cinema is never closer to a feat of engineering than when a long take is unfolding. But engineering is not art, and it is entirely possible to be awestruck by one while lamenting the absence of the other.

This review appeared in Mint.