BLITZ RAISES LONDON FROM FIRES OF HORRIFIC WORLD WAR AIR BATTLE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The world has heard the horrific war story before, but like Londoners, who felt the bombs drop night after night for eight months, the story of the Blitz gets told over and over again.

Director Steve McQueen introduces the chaos of the fire storms before the camera finds the leading characters and the narrative tract.

This historical drama dramatizes the true stories of the Blitz during World War II when Adolf Hitler’s Germany attempted to conquer the Island of Great Britain just as they had swept through Europe with lightening aerial bombardment.

McQueen develops the mother and son relationship just before George is sent, for his own safety, into the countryside with the other children of London.

Saoirise Ronan reinvents herself again, this time as George’s mother, Rita, deeply connected with him, so much so she only sends him away at the last minute, on the last train from London into the countryside.

The narrative has this Disneyesque quality as George, played by Elliott Hefferman, does not want to leave his mother in London, and instead escapes the very first chance he gets.

George is a mature 9 year old, but his part in the film has this enigmatic charm that resembles one part coming of age film and one part Peter Pan adventure fantasy.

McQueen splits the narrative in two, with one part continuing on in London, as Rita finds her role in the war effort, first as a machinist in a bomb factory and then in a bomb shelter as a first aid attendant.

The story initially seems to be about Rita and Saoirise Ronan’s performance in a leading role – like just how good of an actor has the four time Academy Award nominee become. Rita is distraught but finds valuable things to do with her time.

McQueen highlights Ronan with a bit of extra light as she mingles in dark sets with blonde hair and a light complexion.

The camera follows George for a bit on the train and then goes back to Rita in London. But then George decides to turn around and go back to the love of his mother’s arms. And the camera begins to mainly follow George on that journey, with Rita becoming more and more the backstory, but ever in the young boy’s thoughts.

The narrative recurringly returns to London to remind everyone of the horrors of the Blitz and how the community was so desperate to survive. But George also has one frightful experience after another on his return journey in a parallel narrative.

McQueen seems to have seamlessly compiled together a series of psychotropic experiences for the narrative, like recurring childhood nightmares telling different parts of a horrific true story learnt in bits and pieces from neighbourhood friends and during very serious debriefings around the family dinner table.

Several of the adventures George finds himself on are independent truths of the Blitz, like the looting of shops and macabre robbing of the dead, and the flooding of the Balham subway station. And London Authorities did reluctantly open up the underground subway system for people to use as bomb shelters.

Everything else has this surreal anonymity like in childhood nightmares in which people and events seem familiar, but not likely, and the young mind is thankfully woken up, although by something more horrific than being trapped in a dreamscape.

And a dull camera lens often provides that aesthetic of seeing, while asleep, through the fantastical childhood imagination.

McQueen uses the Jungian archetypes for mother to drive the subplot, while the Jungian trickster is used as the main narrative device.

While many anonymous Londoners fearing imminent death are driven by instinctual survival impulses, George has an all-knowing omniscience that only children and filmmakers have (after having finished all the story boards) of being convinced of him returning to be with his mother as being the correct choice.

Elliot Heffernan, as the trickster, knows he should be with his mother and he also knows that he should not be discriminated against.

The Balham subway station flooding becomes the deluge myth. And George survives as the hero, waking up in the comfort of a volunteer’s home, like Peter Pan finding himself safe back in Kensington Gardens after escaping the pirates in Neverland.

McQueen weaves London’s racial politics into the script, with several scenes involving discussions about equality and racial harmony, usually after the camera confronts racial bigotry in some form. George is mixed race after his mother Rita had a relationship with a black man she met at a London Jazz club.

The script constantly dances back and forth from tranquil moments to traumatically interrupting frightful events. This contrast of scene sequences inevitable becomes an emotive device that is driven even deeper by an original music score.

Composer Hanz Zimmer compels the narrative beyond what words can accomplish, further than anything that can be rationalized, and into scenes that emote pure emotional responses.

Stephen Graham has a role in the film’s reversal scenes as a Dickensian leader of a group of looters and corpse robbers that enlist George to squeeze in between burnt timbers of bombed out jewelry stores and nightclubs in search of preowned treasure. The macabre scene sequences show just how fragile humanity can become under the pressure of the life and death struggles that the Blitz brought to London.

The childhood influences of fantastical stories and nightmarish dreamscapes edits well together because of a heavy layer of camera angles and film aesthetics. McQueen has spent a lot of creative energy seamlessly advancing the scenes underneath the telling of a deeply disturbing human tragedy.

One scene advance takes the interpretation of the true events from abstract dots to the moonlit waves of the English Channel as seen below from the perspective of the German bomber pilots.

Blitz is an aesthetically pleasing and emotionally compelling film perfected within a 2 hr runtime by stylizing every scene within a brief storyline that occurs over perhaps 48 frightful hours of a young boy’s life.

STORY OF FINAL DAYS BECOMES PERFORMANCE OF A LIFETIME

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Director Pablo Lorrain spins out a psychological drama about famous 20^th century opera singer Maria Callas.

The camera finds Callas dead on the floor of her Paris apartment in the opening scenes. The narrative then gives way to a wraparound and bends time backwards, but just for a week prior to the protagonist’s death in Maria (2024).

The story then begins moving forward to answer the question about what happened.

Lorrain turns these 7 days into the lifetime of the leading character by spinning in dramatized news reels and flash backs to an earlier time, such as when entertaining Nazi officers, while also getting closer to the estimated time of death.

A light aesthetic masquerades the film as a home movie and suspends disbelief so as to suggest the film may actually be occurring in realtime, like watching a film being made within a film that only dreams are made of.

Writer Stephen Knight collaborates with Lorrain again, after writing the script for Spencer (2016), which is a psychodrama biopic about just how unhappy and confused the life of Princess Diana may have been.

Lorrain is also known for Jackie (2016), in which the director uses the interview as a narrative device to tell the story of a still grieving First Lady, just weeks after the assassination of her husband, John F. Kennedy.

Maria is interviewed as well, except by her Quaalude fueled imagination.

Angelina Jolie creates a beautiful performance as the title character, compelling scenes in real movie time as well as in flashbacks to her more famous operatic performances. And then there are the impromptu meetings with Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.

Overall, the film unfolds a bit like an opera with the camera lens often fitting a room into the view finder like looking at the stage from the orchestra row seats of an opera house.

Jolie sings in several scene sequences, sometime in movie realtime in her kitchen and sometimes in movie flashbacks to performances at the opera house.

Maria is presented as being in control of her last days and directing the action of others just as she might in an opera with everyone being there and playing a role to facilitate her singing. The 2 h 4 m runtime of the film may or may not be the length of a real life opera performance.

Everything involved and all, Jolie creates a certain beauty in the character study and compels the scenes forward with this unpredictable uncertainty about what is real and what is imagined, and what parts of each form the diva’s final self penned opera.

The film quickly becomes intertextual and self referential – with the latest assumption being that this particular flashback will be a new narrative moving forward at least for a few more scenes.

But Lorrain brings Maria back to the Paris apartment, and then from there, everyone may go to a famous Parisian sidewalk café.

Jolie is more often than not centered on stage, but she shares several scenes with Maria’s butler and housemaid, Ferruccia and Bruna, played by Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher, respectively.

Ferrucia spends a lot of time complaining about his back pain while moving the piano around in the apartment at Maria’s direction. This not so gentle play soon becomes a domino for a bit of humour found elsewhere, whenever Maria is not brooding.

The uncertainty created by the imaginary narrative of Maria being interviewed by her Quaalude induced imagination is a kind of running joke among the servantry, who take their part in ‘the play within a play’ very seriously.

The film in the end draws an analogy between Maria losing her voice and Maria dying of a broken heart because she had lost her voice.

A FILM BEING MADE WITHIN A FILM THAT ONLY DREAMS ARE MADE OF

The film is kept a bit gritty with a documentary tone and a light treatment of aesthetics that keeps everything grounded inside the Paris apartment – like a family secret.

At times, everyone seems to be looking through the eyes of the hallucinating title character, which eventually brings everyone around to thinking about how tragic the opera singer’s last days were.

The famous life can be glamourous and engaging, but may often be, particularly at the end of the day, plain and ordinary.

The truth about fascism was difficult to tell in public even for the Christians protected by the church in Germany.

Director Todd Kormarnicki tells the story of Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the direction he took the Lutheran church before he was hung for treason in Bonhoeffer (2024).

The fragmented narrative follows the psychological chaos of the mind of the neo-orthodox theologian as he prepares to accept his own death on April 9, 1945.

Kormarnicki begins with Dietrich’s childhood in Germany, just before his brother gets sent off to fight in World War I. Walter is meant to return the hero, but in the next scene sequence, which follows with a sense of immediacy as if Walter had never left, he is shown in an open coffin being buried in his uniform.

Jonas Dassler creates a complicated character performance in Bonhoeffer as the Dietrich’s real world learning quickly accelerates from a few moments at peace during his childhood to an educated theologian living and studying with Christians in New York City.

Bonhoeffer learns from a black Christian fellowship in Harlem about a deeper love for Jesus as well as about racial hatred living day to day on the streets of New York City.

The narrative takes a long time, bringing everybody to all the places that shaped Bonhoeffer into the hero he became known as, and how the church, that initially was swayed into silence by Nazism, gradually bends back toward a more honest criticism of Germany under the fascist leadership of Adolf Hitler.

Cinematographer John Mathieson creates a tone and atmosphere that suggests more sinister matters are unfolding. Several scenes are brilliantly dipped in shadow as the protagonists discuss darker subject matters.

Kormarnicki also uses a score, composed by Gabriel Ferreira and Antonio Pinto, that runs in the background behind dialogue scenes, which creates a lot of tension because of the substantive subject matter of the discussions between characters that syncs with the musical composition.

A lot of suspense is developed to get to the point where one of the assassination attempts fails, but the scene sequences disclosing the details about Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the assignation plot never seem to happen in any great substance.

The film is more about the challenges facing heroism in circumstances of great social uncertainty and personal danger. Dassler shows that the good character of the Lutheran pastor is the foundation of his heroism.

Essentially, the Nazis went too far by overwriting the Bible to infuse Arianism and the cult of the personality. This fascist revisionism and anti-Christian teaching about Jesus created a sense of outrage among the Church leaders and congregation, so much so that they began to put their own lives at risk to be able to speak the truth.

The Chistian church also became outraged at the treatment of the Jewish population, eventually gaining the knowledge about the Nazi’s killing the Jews in the concentration camps. At one point, Bonhoeffer is involved in a betrayal of Nazi authority by setting 7 Jews free at the border with Switzerland so that they could tell the world about the unfolding genocide.

FRAGMENTED NARRATIVE FOLLOWS PSYCHOLOGICAL CHAOS OF A MIND REFLECTING ON LIFE JUST BEFORE DEATH

A layer of aesthetics also moves scenes put together with various artful compositions, while several camera shots have clearly been inspired by creative forces.

Although there is a need to keep the truth alive, the movie avoids telling another story of Jews being hidden from the Nazis and saved from the gas chambers of the concentration camp system by focussing on the character of the hero that risked his own life to liberate the Jews.

The less obvious overall vision of the film seems to be scenes put together from gentle fragments of memory in which a person being executed the next day might be expected to become consumed.

The narrative is also presented as a metaphor for a Bible Dietrich’s brother gave him, with underlined passages, that mirror the unfolding of Dietrich’s life one select page at a time, as he nears the point that he will join his brother in Heaven.