Tag: Kenneth Branagh

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Coltrane’s sweetest notes

 

© BBC

 

Actor and comedian Robbie Coltrane, who died on October 14th, seemed part of the furniture in British TV shows and films when I was in my late teens and twenties.  His performing talents, gallus manner and considerable physique made him impossible to ignore.

 

Also, as someone who’d grown up mostly in Scotland, I – and everyone I knew – appreciated the fact that he was a Scottish lad.  Originally, he’d been one Anthony MacMillan from Rutherglen, with his stage name inspired by the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane.  It’s fair to say that Scotland did not get much attention in the London-centric media of 1980s Thatcherite Britain, except when it fleetingly made the news as the site of yet another factory or colliery closure. (Admittedly, things are only slightly better in 2022.)  Thus, seeing Coltrane on popular, national telly or in movies reaching international audiences, and seeing him be unashamedly Scottish too, felt like a victory.

 

Anyway, here are a dozen of my dozen favourite TV and cinematic moments involving Robbie Coltrane.

 

The Young Ones (1984)

Coltrane made three appearances in the groundbreakingly anarchic BBC comedy show The Young Ones.  I remember him best in the episode Bambi, which may have been the first time he registered on my radar.  Bambi is the one where Rik (Rik Mayall), Vyvyan (Ade Edmondson), Neil (Nigel Planer) and Mike (Christopher Ryan) appear on University Challenge (up against a snooty team from ‘Footlights College, Oxbridge’ comprised of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Ben Elton), while Motorhead play The Ace of Spades in their living room.  Observing the shenanigans through a microscope is Coltrane as a genteel, old-fashioned Scottish doctor (“Absolutely amazing! Human beings the size of amoebas!”), possibly modelled on Dr Finlay in the 1930s stories by A.J. Cronin.  Coltrane brings the episode to an abrupt end when he accidentally drops an éclair on the specimen slide, burying Rik, Vyvyan and co. in creamy goo.

 

Laugh???  I Almost Paid My Licence Fee (1984)

During the early 1980s, Coltrane featured in three TV comedy sketch shows, Alfresco (1983-84), which also featured the afore-mentioned Fry, Laurie, Thompson and Elton; A Kick Up The Eighties (1984); and Laugh??? I Almost Paid My Licence Fee (1984).  In the latter, Coltrane made several memorable appearances as a West-of-Scotland Orangeman called Mason Boyne.  With his imposing bulk and craggy features, and wearing a black suit, bowler hat and sash,  Coltrane certainly looked the part.  Laugh? was produced by BBC Scotland and this was one of the very few times when the broadcaster was bold enough to have a go at the Orange Order and its paranoia about all things Popish.  “It’s all here, Matthew Chapter 2, Verses 1-10,” says Boyne, citing the Bible in support of his assertion that the Pope is the Antichrist.  “All you have to do is… jumble the words up a bit.”

 

© BBC

 

Caravaggio (1986)

Throughout the 1980s Coltrane had supporting or minor roles in many British or made-in-Britain films.  These include, incidentally, several forgotten fantasy and science-fiction ones: Death Watch (1980), Flash Gordon (1980), Britannia Hospital (1982), Krull (1983) and Slipstream (1989).  Okay, Flash Gordon hasn’t been forgotten – unfortunately.  Anyway, in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, he gives a performance that’s stayed in my memory more than most.  He plays Scipione Borghese, the 17th century cardinal who becomes the patron of the turbulent Italian painter.  As usual with Jarman, there’s striking set design, deliberately littered with anachronisms, and the film sees the debuts of Tilda Swinton and Sean Bean.

 

Mona Lisa (1986)

Coltrane also provides good support in Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa.  He plays Thomas, a garage-owner who offers sanctuary for the movie’s main character, old friend and harassed ex-convict George, played by the incomparable Bob Hoskins.  Thomas has no bearing on the film’s plot, which sees George employed by a gangster (Michael Caine) to drive around and look after high-class prostitute Simone (Cathy Tyson), whom he gradually falls in love with. But the friendship Thomas offers George is one of the few specks of light in a bleak film.  His best line comes when he walks in on George while George is watching a dodgy video he’s obtained – discovering to his horror that it features his beloved Simone in some hardcore porn.  Innocently, Thomas asks, “Channel 4, is it?”

 

Tutti Frutti (1987)

The pinnacle of Coltrane’s 1980s work, the tragi-comedy series Tutti Frutti is surely the best piece of television to come out of Scotland.  At the time, I remember the New Musical Express hailing it as ‘the best TV show ever’, though sadly those know-nothing kids running the 2022 online version of the NME didn’t even mention Tutti Frutti in their Coltrane obituary.  Written by John Byrne, Tutti Frutti has Coltrane as Danny McGlone, who’s drafted in to sing for a vintage Scottish rock ‘n’ roll band called the Majestics after their original singer, Danny’s older brother, is killed in a car accident.  The Majestics are on a death-spiral, largely due to the antics of guitarist Vincent Driver (Maurice Roëves, who died last year).  Driver styles himself as ‘the iron man of Scottish rock’, but his personal life is a destructive shambles.  The band’s conniving manager Eddie Clockerty (a never-better Richard Wilson) doesn’t help things, either.

 

One consolation for Danny is another recent addition to the band’s line-up – guitarist Suzy Kettles, played by Emma Thomson with an impressively convincing Glaswegian accent. He gradually falls for the sassy Suzy, though she has her own issues – an abusive ex-husband, who happens to be a dentist.  Can Danny and Suzy get together while, around them, everything descends into a hellhole of fights, farce, humiliation, depression, knifings, suicide and extreme dental violence?  Due to copyright problems over its title song, written and recorded by Little Richard in 1955, Tutti Frutti didn’t get another airing for a very long time.  Happily, it’s now available on DVD and three years ago was shown again on BBC Scotland.

 

© BBC

 

Blackadder the Third (1987)

Coltrane played the celebrated lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson three times on stage and screen.  His best-remembered performance as the famously irascible Johnson is in the Ink and Incapability episode of the much-loved TV comedy Blackadder, wherein the crafty title character (Rowan Atkinson) and his hapless minion Baldrick (Tony Robinson) accidentally incinerate the one and only copy of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) prior to its publication.  This leaves them with just one night to write a replacement dictionary before Johnson finds out and inflicts his wrath upon them.  In the funniest scene, Johnson boasts that his dictionary “contains every word in our beloved language.”  To which Blackadder offers him his “most enthusiastic contrafibularities.”  He sticks the knife in by adding, “I’m anaspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation.”

 

Henry V (1989)

Sir John Falstaff, a prominent character in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, is actually dead at the start of Henry V.  However, in this cinematic version, writer and director Kenneth Branagh couldn’t bear to leave out the portly, garrulous rogue, so he showed Coltrane as Falstaff in an all-too-brief flashback.  Falstaff was a role Coltrane was clearly born to play and it’s a tragedy he never got cast in a proper adaptation of the two Henry IV plays (or for that matter The Merry Wives of Windsor).

 

Nuns on the Run (1990)

Nuns on the Run, which has Coltrane and Monty Python’s Eric Idle as criminals trying to escape some nastier criminals and taking refuge, and donning disguises, in a convent, is truly a one-joke film.  That joke is seeing Coltrane dressed as and pretending to be a nun.  It’s a pretty hilarious one, I have to admit.  Though totally inconsequential, Nuns on the Run works better than another comedy he was in during the same period, The Pope Must Die (1991).  North American distributors, nervous about the film’s sacrilegious title and noticing Coltrane’s girth, unsubtly renamed it The Pope Must Diet.

 

© HandMade Films / 20th Century Fox

 

The Bogie Man (1992)

This TV film adapted to the small screen the Alan Grant / John Wagner comic book about a Scotsman with psychiatric issues who believes he’s Humphrey Bogart (or characters Bogie played in the movies) and goes around fighting crime. The TV version was panned by the critics, disowned by Grant and Wagner, and as far as I known has never been reshown.  While I found it underwhelming, I enjoyed Coltrane’s performance as the lead character – occasionally, when not channelling Bogart, he lapses into impersonating Sean Connery and Arnold Schwarzenegger too.  Also, Craig Ferguson, years before he became a superstar on American television, gives a nice supporting turn as the cop on Coltrane’s trail.

 

Cracker (1993-95)

Arguably Coltrane’s greatest role, his work in Cracker as Dr Edward ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald, a criminal psychologist helping out a dysfunctional team of detectives (Christopher Eccleston, Geraldine Somerville, Lorcan Cranitch) won him the British Academy Award for Best Actor three years in a row.  Grim and intense, with the only humour coming from the arrogant, flamboyant and self-destructive Fitz, the show was at its most gruelling during its To Be a Somebody story at the start of season 2.  This involves a terrifyingly credible killer (Robert Carlyle), who’s ended up the way he is largely because of trauma he suffered in the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster.  It also features the murder of one of the show’s main characters.

 

© Granada Television

 

Goldeneye (1995) and The World is Not Enough (1999)

Coltrane’s entertaining turns as ex-KGB man Dimitri Valentin, now a would-be entrepreneur in post-Communist Russia, are among the highlights of these two Bond movies, which have Pierce Brosnan playing 007.  Valentin certainly gets the best lines.  In Goldeneye, when Bond holds a gun to the back of his head and he hears the click of its safety catch, he observes: “Walther PPK, 7.65 millimetre. Only three men I know use such a gun.  I believe I’ve killed two of them.”   And in The World Is Not Enough, when Bond interrogates him about sultry oil tycoon Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), whom Bond has recently bedded, and demands, “What’s your business with Elektra King?”, he retorts, “I thought you were the one giving her the business.”  Valentin, who runs a hellish-sounding country-and-western club in one film and a caviar factory in the other, was devised at a time when Russian oligarchs could be depicted as lovable, comic Arthur-Daley-from-Minder-type grifters; and not sinister billionaires laundering mountains of dirty money in the City of London and buying their way into the heart of the British establishment.

 

From Hell (2001)

Like The Bogey Man, this movie adaptation of Alan Moore’s labyrinthine graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, published in instalments from 1989 to 1998, was disdained by its original creator.  However, if you can erase all memories of Moore’s From Hell and focus solely on the film, it’s decent.  For one thing, it looks at the Ripper’s hideous murders from the perspective of characters commonly neglected in previous films on the subject – his female victims.  Coltrane gives a solid performance as Sergeant George Godley, the loyal, capable and intelligent assistant to the film’s hero, the vulnerable, opium-raddled Inspector Frederick Abberline (Johnny Depp).  A scene where Godley and Abberline are filmed from behind as they approach the funeral ceremony of one Ripper victim, dressed in black suits and bowler hats, even evokes Laurel and Hardy.  (In fact, at one time, Coltrane and Robert Carlyle had tried unsuccessfully to get a Laurel and Hardy movie off the ground.)

 

Thereafter, Coltrane achieved global popularity playing Hagrid in eight Harry Potter movies and got regular gigs doing voice-work in items like The Gruffalo (2009) and Brave (2012).  None of this was my cup of tea, but good on him for securing well-deserved fame and, presumably, fortune too.  It’s just a pity that a few years ago ill-health caught up with him, which deprived our TV and movie screens of his always-welcome presence.

 

© Eon Productions

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Branagh’s Belfast

 

© Northern Ireland Screen / Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

Kenneth Branagh has seemed the embodiment of classical, theatrical Englishness for a long time – at least since his 1989 film adaptation of Henry V, in which he raged “Cry ‘God for Harry, England and Saint George!’”  Meanwhile, over the years, I’ve enjoyed shocking people by pointing out to them that Branagh isn’t actually English.  He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1960.  He and his family left there for England in 1969, shortly after the outbreak of the Troubles.  He ended up in Berkshire, where he dropped his Belfast accent and ‘acquired received pronunciation to avoid bullying.’  Thus began the plummy-voiced Branagh we know today.

 

In fact, Branagh’s early life wasn’t dissimilar to mine, for I was born and brought up in Northern Ireland until the age of 11, when my family moved to the town of Peebles, in the Borders region of Scotland.  I was a couple of years older than Branagh was at the time of moving and couldn’t shed my accent so easily – not that I needed to, because although my new classmates in Peebles sometimes took the piss out of the way I spoke, I was never bullied.  Come to think of it, acquiring ‘received pronunciation to avoid bullying’ probably wouldn’t have been a good policy at Peebles High School.  Folk would have picked on you more for sounding like a posh tosser.

 

Before Branagh made a name for himself as the star, director and adaptor of Henry V, I’d known of his Northern Irish connections because I’d seen him appear in a quartet of TV plays written by the Northern Irish dramatist Graham Reid.  These were Too Late to Talk to Billy (1982), A Matter of Choice for Billy (1983), A Coming to Terms for Billy (1984) and Lorna (1987), and were about the tribulations of a working-class Protestant family in Belfast, the Martins.  The Martins’ problems aren’t caused by the Troubles but by their own flawed, damaged and abrasive personalities.  The widowed father Norman (James Ellis) is an unrepentant hard man, incapable of showing his gentler feelings, while his eldest child and only son Billy (Branagh) is embittered about how Norman treated his late mother.  It’s left to the eldest daughter, the mild-mannered Lorna (Brid Brennan), to act as a surrogate mother to the family’s younger children.  During the plays, unexpected things happen – Norman mellows under the influence of a woman he forms a relationship with while working in England, Lorna develops some unexpected steel and Billy, dismayingly, begins to show some of the worst traits of his dad.  In the four plays Branagh had no problem readopting his old Belfast accent, so I was surprised when a few years later I went to the cinema and heard him speaking fluent Shakespeare in Henry V.

 

Branagh has revisited his Belfast roots with his latest movie Belfast, which was released in the USA last year and has just been released in Britain.  Inspired by Branagh’s experiences during the late 1960s, it tells the story of another working-class Protestant family, one less dysfunctional than the Martins in the Billy plays: a couple simply entitled ‘Ma’ (Catriona Balfe) and ‘Pa’ (Jamie Dornan), and their older son Will (Lewis McAskie) and younger son Buddy (Jude Hill).  Pa spends his working life in England and is considering moving his family over to live with him, something that doesn’t appeal to Ma and the boys.  “I know nothing else but Belfast,” she protests.  For one thing, they have strong family ties in the city, most notably Pa’s parents, the droll Pop (Ciaran Hines) and stern but kindly Granny (Judi Dench).  Then the Troubles erupt and Protestant paramilitaries led by local thug Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan) chase the Catholic families out of their neighbourhood.  As the paramilitaries’ grip on the area tightens, Pa falls foul of Clanton and it becomes clear that, like it or not, his family will have to leave too.

 

© Northern Ireland Screen / Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

This basic plot could have made Belfast a grim film, but it’s a funny, good-natured one because these events are seen through the eyes of little Buddy.  They have to compete for attention with all the things that matter to a normal nine-year-old boy – things ranging from pursuing your first love to getting initiated into the local kids’ gang, from making trips to the cinema to bonding with your granddad.

 

Belfast left me with mixed emotions.  On one hand, I found it annoyingly overstated in places.  On the other, I generally found it rather moving.  I’ll explain my conflicting reactions in detail, starting with the negative ones.

 

I have to admit that until now Henry V is the only film by Branagh that I’ve enjoyed.  I wasn’t impressed by his later adaptations of Shakespeare, like Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000), and I hated his version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994).  They seemed shrill and over-the-top in both their acting and their visuals.  Originally, I thought this was because Branagh didn’t have confidence in the original texts by Shakespeare and Shelley to capture the attention of modern film audiences.  He felt obliged to make them as bombastic as possible, pumping them up with the cinematic equivalent of steroids – operatic performances, hammy humour, fast-moving camerawork and so on.  Nowadays, though, I just think the problem is that Branagh, basically, is a theatrical man.  When you’re on a stage, performing for a live audience, everything has to be big – the voice projection, the gestures, the general drama – in order to be seen and heard. But what’s effective from a distant stage often seems unsubtle when it’s projected in fine detail onto a large movie screen.  And that’s the impression I sometimes got with Belfast.

 

In its plot machinations, visuals and soundtrack, there are some broad brushstrokes indeed.  You get heavy-handed pieces of comedy, such as when Buddy cheats at his homework in order to get placed at the desk beside the girl he fancies at school – their teacher positions the pupils from the front to the back of the classroom according to how good or bad their marks are, and Buddy’s sweetheart, the brightest kid in class, is right at the front.  (From a teaching point of view, wouldn’t it be sensible to have the less able kids at the front, so you can keep a close eye on them, and the smart ones at the back?)

 

Meanwhile, Branagh shoots the film in black and white but inserts colour at certain moments.  These are when Buddy’s family go to the cinema.  Although the auditorium is filmed in monochrome, what’s happening on the screen – action from Hammer’s One Million Years BC (1966) and the movie version of Roald Dahl’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) – appears in its original, glorious technicolour.  As a metaphor for how the cinema transports Buddy out of his black-and-white everyday existence and into the colourful dreamworld of the movies, this is pretty clunking.

 

© Northern Ireland Screen / Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

By far the worst offender, though, is a scene where Pa confronts Billy Clanton on a street.  Clanton is holding his family at gunpoint and there’s a squad of British Army soldiers looking on, pointing weapons at everybody.  I know we’re meant to be viewing this through Buddy’s eyes.  But still, it seems crass and cheesy that at this deadly-serious moment Tex Ritter starts singing Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling from the classic 1952 western High Noon – which Buddy has recently watched on TV – on the soundtrack.  Billy Clanton, incidentally, was the name of one of the villainous Clanton Gang who took on the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday during the gunfight at the OK Corral, another touch that’s a bit too obvious.

 

All that aside, however, I have to say I enjoyed Belfast.  It’s nice to see a film about Northern Ireland that isn’t primarily about terrorism, extreme religion or extreme politics, and that focuses on believable, relatable people who are just trying to get on with their lives.  It also contains a lot of humour, something that’s usually in short supply in movies about Northern Ireland, even though I remember knowing many funny, witty characters when I lived there.  (Ciaran Hines’ genial, good-hearted Pop, who manages to be on Buddy’s wavelength without ever patronising him, initially seemed too good to be true – but again, I realised, I’d known several old guys like him during my childhood.)

 

Branagh conveys the idea that, as a kid in Northern Ireland, the popular culture of the time enthused you just as it enthused kids in more ‘normal’ societies, and influenced you as much as (if not more than) the riots and bombings that were happening not far from your doorstep. Thus, we see Buddy dressing up like a cast-member of Thunderbirds (1965-66), watching Star Trek (1966-69), playing with Subbuteo and James Bond toy cars, and reading the Marvel comic The Mighty Thor, which allows Branagh to sneakily reference the 2011 movie Thor, which he directed.  (I don’t know how easy it was to access Marvel comics in Belfast in 1969, especially as Marvel’s British subsidiary Marvel UK didn’t begin operating until 1972.  Still, I remember finding an American edition of The Avengers in Enniskillen in the early 1970s, so I guess it was possible.)

 

If there’s one thing I find unconvincing about the characters, it’s that the tribal symbols that existed in Northern Ireland’s Protestant and Catholic communities, even in 1969 before the Troubles hardened people’s senses of identity, are absent.  There’s little said or shown about being British or Irish, about Union Jacks or tricolours, about the Orange Order or Gaelic Athletics Association.  Actually, at a few points Buddy’s relatives describe themselves as ‘Irish’ (“The Irish were born for leaving – otherwise, the rest of the world would have no pubs…”  “All the Irish need to survive is a phone, a Guinness and the sheet music to Danny Boy…”), although I expect most Belfast Protestants would call themselves ‘British’.  Compare this with a scene in Graham Reid’s A Coming to Terms for Billy when Norman Martin’s two youngest daughters discuss, unenthusiastically, the prospect of their dad taking them to England.  When one points out how disliked the Irish are in England, the other retorts, “We’re not Irish.  We’re Protestants!”

 

Still, Belfast definitely shows that Branagh’s heart is in the right place even if, occasionally, his plotting and filmmaking instincts aren’t.  The black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous and his use of classic Van Morrison songs on the soundtrack – Warm Love, Jackie Wilson Said, Bright Side of the Road, Days Like This, Carrickfergus and, inevitably at the end, The Healing has Begun – is a reminder that however much Van the Man has degenerated these days into a curmudgeonly, whinging old fart who’d pick a fight with his own shadow, he did, once upon a time, record some wonderful music.

 

And, ultimately, Branagh shows that despite the terrible things that have gone on there, Northern Ireland is a place that exerts a powerful hold on your affections.  This is illustrated in the scene where Ma and Pa break the news to Buddy that they’re all going to leave Belfast and move to England.  Poor Buddy promptly bursts into tears.

 

I remember when my mother took me aside in 1976 and told me that we were going to move to Scotland.  I reacted in exactly the same way.

 

© Northern Ireland Screen / Focus Features / Universal Pictures

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All the time in the whirled

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Syncopy

 

A  few weeks ago Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster movie Tenet (2020) arrived in Sri Lanka.

 

Tenet must have been welcomed by Sri Lankan cinema owners, because for months after the easing of the country’s strict Covid-19 lockdown they were able to show only a meagre selection of movies.  For example, once the Savoy Cinema in our neighbourhood in Wellawatta had reopened, it was limited to showing the Sri Lankan / Sinhala comedy drama The Newspaper (2020); and Frozen II (2019) from the previous year’s Christmas season; and something called Primal (2019), starring Nicholas Cage as a big game hunter, of which orcasound.com noted: “All you need to know is that the best scenes in the film are those between Cage and a red parrot.  They have the best on screen chemistry of any of the actors.”

 

Yet when my partner and I went to see Tenet a few afternoons ago, we had the cinema almost to ourselves.  Only one other couple was present, and they walked out two-thirds of the way through, presumably for reasons I’ll talk about in a minute.  Admittedly, we’d decided to treat ourselves for this, our first visit to the cinema in absolute ages, and booked seats in the high-end Gold Standard Theatre in the cinema complex above the swanky Colombo City Centre shopping mall.  The Gold Standard Theatre contains only a small number of seats, so that those seats can be as big and comfortable as possible.  But despite the fact that the place was designed for a small audience and despite the high price (by Sri Lankan standards) of the tickets, I’d expected to see a few more folk there.

 

The fact is, for all its spectacle and entertainment value, Tenet is not a movie with obvious mass appeal.  It’s challenging – at times, bloody bewildering.  I can imagine Hollywood bigwigs experiencing an initial burst of excitement that someone had had the balls to deliver a big-budget sci-fi movie part of the way through the Covid-19 pandemic, one that would hopefully encourage the pandemic-cowed public to venture into cinemas again – but then gnashing their teeth when they realised that Christopher Nolan had created something as likely to exhaust the viewers’ braincells as it was to get their adrenalin flowing.  No doubt those afore-mentioned Sri Lankan cinema owners have felt the same emotions recently.

 

Just how mentally taxing is Tenet, then?  Well, you need to keep your wits about you from the start.  There’s a lot going on even in the first few minutes.  An unnamed CIA agent (John David Washington) barely manages to survive a hostage-siege-rescue operation in Ukraine and then finds himself opted into a top-secret organisation called Tenet, which is grappling with the phenomenon of mysterious materials that can travel backwards through time, for example, bullets that shoot back into their guns before you fire them.  These materials are traced to arms-dealing Russian oligarch scumbag Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), who seems to have established a link with unseen forces in the future, who for some nefarious reason are sending the stuff back to him in the here-and-now.

 

There follows a series of adventures in India, Britain, Italy, Norway, Estonia and Russia where Washington tries to close in on Branagh, discover what he and his futuristic allies are up to and – when it transpires that they’re up to something very bad indeed – stop them from doing it.  To this end, he has to win the trust of Branagh’s abused and disillusioned wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), and enlist her to his cause.  Also, he encounters several giant whirligig-type devices that can change the orientation by which you’re moving through time, switching you from moving forward through it to moving backwards through it, and vice versa.  And that’s when things start to get truly complicated…

 

I’ll confess that there was a period of 15 or 20 minutes (which coincidentally was when the other people in the cinema threw in the towel and left) when I hadn’t a clue what was going on.  But I kept watching and eventually, towards the movie’s end, I figured the plot out.  Well, I think I figured it out.  Though afterwards, I have to say, I tried not to discuss the intricacies of Tenet too much with my partner, for fear that she’d point out something to me that made me realise I hadn’t understood it at all.

 

Some critics have blamed the film’s sound mixing, claiming that it’s difficult to follow what’s happening because you can’t hear all the dialogue clearly.  But to be honest I don’t think there’s much exposition in the dialogue anyway.  Nolan bravely forces his audience to concentrate on events on the screen and, from those, gradually pick up the gist of things.

 

So that’s the challenging part of Tenet described.  What about the rest of it?  I’m pleased to say that it’s generally really good.  For a start, it looks magnificent, at least on a big screen.  Leave out the time-travelling element and what you have is Christopher Nolan doing his version of a James Bond movie.  Like the average Bond, Tenet features a string of glamorous locations, speeding from one to the other so that you never have time to get bored.  Ensconced on his luxury yacht and simmering with a mixture of 60% pure evilness and 40% teeth-grinding jealousy as 007, sorry, John David Washington, wins the affections of his missus, Branagh is a pure Bond villain – most closely modelled, I’d say, on Emilio Largo in 1965’s Thunderball.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Syncopy

 

Several of the action set-pieces resemble turbo-powered versions of set-pieces from old Bond films too.  The bit where Washington and his accomplice Neil (Robert Pattinson) infiltrate the multi-storey stronghold of an Indian arms dealer put me in mind of the bungee-jumping sequence at the start of 1995’s Goldeneye, although here Washington and Pattinson somehow manage to bungee-jump upwards rather than downwards.  The London section sees a brief but pleasingly nasty fight in a restaurant kitchen that’s reminiscent of the kitchen fight in 1987’s The Living Daylights.  And a vehicle-chase scene has Washington trying to board a hurtling armoured truck by swinging across to it using the ladders on top of a similarly hurtling fire engine, which calls to mind a sequence in 1985’s A View to a Kill.  All right, in the 1985 movie, the person on the ladders was a 57-year-old Roger Moore and the driver of the fire engine was Tanya Roberts from TV’s Charlie’s Angels (1980), so Tenet’s version of this is rather less cheesy.

 

The new official Bond movie No Time to Die – the trailer for which was actually shown in the cinema before Tenet started – will have its work cut out to match the spectacle that Nolan offers here.  Indeed, it’s just been announced that the release of No Time to Die has been pushed back from November 2020 to April 2021, supposedly because of fears about how the pandemic will impact on box office takings.  I can’t help having a sneaking suspicion, though, that after seeing Tenet Bond producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli took fright and decided they needed more time to beef up their movie’s action sequences.

 

Tenet’s cast is also a pleasure.  Washington has received some flak from critics for playing his character as a ‘cypher’, which I can’t understand.  I find him a very personable actor, with as much charisma as his dad, and besides his character does display some humanity, largely in relation to Elizabeth Debicki’s Kat, whom he tries to protect from her oligarch husband even as he reluctantly encourages her to conspire against him.  The elegant Debicki gives a good performance too, one combining vulnerability with resilience.  I particularly like the fact that Nolan cast a tall actress here.  190 centimetres in height, Debicki looms some 15 centimetres above both Washington and Branagh, but this isn’t allowed to be an issue.  (I can think of certain temperamental, short-ass actors of yesteryear who’d probably have refused to work with her.)

 

And Robert Pattinson gives an endearing turn as the bemused, raffish Neil, shaking off memories of how he once had to play a spangly adolescent vampire in the limp Twilight movies (2008-12).  Mind you, at times, it feels like he’s channelling the Eames character played by Tom Hardy in 2010’s Inception, the movie in Nolan’s back catalogue that Tenet most resembles.

 

In conclusion, then, Tenet is an unlikely mixture, simultaneously a blockbuster homage to the James Bond movies and an enigma that’s completely unafraid to baffle its audience.  It’s half Goldfinger (1964) and half ‘go figure’.  I enjoyed both halves, although I’m glad there was plenty of action and spectacle to soothe my eyes even when my brain felt beleaguered.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Syncopy