Reviewed here:

• Brick Lane
• Elizabeth:  The Golden Age
• Redacted

Brick Lane, directed by Sarah Gavron ***

Brick Lane is based on a book of the same name by Monica Ali.  Both the book and the movie have been the subject of much controversy regarding the way in which they portray the Bangladeshi community in East London.  This has included claims of misrepresentation by many who did not read the book, and a campaign that resulted in Prince Charles cancelling his attendance at a planned gala in late October.  Frankly, I don’t understand what all the excitement is about.

The story begins with a death, actually in a flashback.  Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) witnesses her own mother’s death, an event that will change the course of Nazneen’s life.  Without a mother, Nazneen must be married off, and the husband is an older, supposedly successful businessman in London.  Chanu (Satish Kaushik) is rather full of himself, a man imminently expecting promotion, but it’s easy to see from his modest home that his job is not as exhalted as he makes out.  The promotion falls through, and Chanu’s bitterness leads him to resign rather than tolerate being passed over.

Chanu also has a love of classical education and his frequent quotes only add to his pompous appearance.  Needless to say, the two do not get on well.

Nazneen, like many other women in her neighbourhood, takes in sewing work subcontracted from a clothing manufacturer.  Through this, she meets Karim (Christopher Simpson), the son of her employer who delivers materials to and from various seamstresses.  With him there is real warmth and love.

The story is set in 2001, and the September 11 attacks lead to racist attacks and countermovements.  Chanu is at sea in this because his cherished western civilization is not quite so civil after all.

In time, Nazneen discovers that she is not the only woman in Karim’s life, and her first great love ends in disappointment.  Meanwhile, she has grown to appreciate her husband and see beyond his exterior.  As she says, some love comes on you all at once and then ebbs bit by bit, other love grows a little at a time until you realize what you have.

At the Q&A, Satish Jaushik, who is a well-known director and comic in India, said that it was a stretch for him to play a serious, unsympathetic role.  He is a man who discovers himself and loses his pomposity, bit by bit, and like Nazneen, we come to embrace him for all his faults.

This is a very human story that could have been set in Victorian England or many other locales, but without the immediacy of a modern city and culture.  I hope that the film is seen for what it is and opens to a welcoming audience.

Elizabeth:  The Golden Age, directed by Shekhar Kapur *1/2

What can I say about this dog of a film?  It’s got an A-list cast, it’s a sequel to a great hit, it’s got great costumes and effects, but do I care?  No.

When Kapur had the idea of making another Elizabeth, his friends and associates asked “Why?”, but he didn’t listen.

The whole film is a mixture of overblown comic book history and soap opera from beginning to end, and I don’t care if they had great locations like Westminster Cathedral.  Nice shots, but a waste of a good building.

The Catholics, with Philip of Spain as the arch evil-monger, are doomed from the beginning to spend their time wearing black.  They don’t understand that they’re going to lose in this story, and all that is missing is a lot of hand-wringing and drool.  Not the brightest lot around.

The Protestants, with our Virgin Elizabeth as their leader, get a wider colour palette.  Cate Blanchett reprises her role, but please, someone, tell me she did it for the money, not for her art.  By the time we reach the destruction of the Spadish Armada, we first see our Cate in gleaming armour astride a lovely horse (obviously someone has seen Branagh’s Henry V), but later in little more than an underdress, hair flowing in the wind on a cliff overlooking the channel.  They never told us these bits in history when I went to school many years ago.  Possibly these are the naughty parts they left out. 

Geoffrey Rush is back as Sir Francis Walshingham, the man who knows everything, and has some nasty toys to get the information he needs in a pinch.  Nice man, Sir Francis, but assume that he reads all of your mail.  He makes sure that the pretender, Mary Queen of Scots, thinks her coded letters are safe, but in doing so gives Elizabeth the evidence she needs to condemn Mary for treason.  Off with her head!

Sir Francis dies at the end of this film.  Sigh.

Oh yes, mustn’t forget the love interest — Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) — someone to amuse the Queen and show us her lighter side, for a time.

I suppose I should say a bit about the Armada.  This whole sequence looked like left over footage from Lord of the Rings  with a CGI fleet in place of all those Orcs.  The English win in what appears to be an afternoon’s outing when in fact the battle lasted weeks.  Dramatic licence.

Elizabeth has a great speech rallying the troops that, in the original, includes a famous line about “the body of a weak and feeble woman”.  Kapur omits this part, probably them most important of all, because he had already used it in his first film.  What can I say?

Finally, the title itself is a misnomer.  The Golden Age was the long rein of peace and English domination of the seas after the Armada went to the bottom, but Kapur used up all his film just getting us this far.

I could not help comparing this with the Tom Hooper’s production Elizabeth with Helen Mirren which aired on HBO and is available on DVD.  It’s longer and much more detailed, and they have the good sense to sink the Armada off screen.

Watch the DVD.  Skip the movie.

Redacted, by Brian de Palma ***1/2

“Redacted” is a fancy word for “censored”, and in this powerful film, Brian de Palma shows us how our view of events is coloured by what we are allowed to see.

The basic situation is simple — a group of US soldiers mans a barricade, they sit around in barracks, and they go for occasional raids through the neighbourhood looking for the bad guys.  The stuff of nightly news, but things are not what they seem.

Several men clearly suffer from stress and are, mildly speaking, inappropriate for the situation they are in.  When a planted explosive kills one of their company, this triggers a revenge mission that is based on a real incident.  A group of soldiers, led by a hothead who won’t brook the idea the mission is wrong, breaks into a house on the pretext of looking for a terrorist, kill innocent people and rape a young girl.

De Palma presents the story with a variety of media.  In a film-within-a-film, a French crew is shooting Barrage, a documentary about the boredom manning a checkpoint.  A pseudo Al Jazeera reports the news, but with a slant unfamiliar to western audiences.  Terrorist websites show attacks on foreigners with planted bombs.  One soldier is shooting his own video hoping, after the war, to get into film school.  Different media provide different points of view, and “the facts” vary with the presenter.

Redacted is a condemnation of the racism and futility inherent in the Iraq war, and an indictment of the many events viewers sitting at home don’t see because the western media are so controlled.

The Q&A took a surreal turn because De Palma has been instructed not to talk about the real criminal proceedings underway for events he depicts.  A helpful member of the audience filled in the blanks.  Here, at a screening about censorship, the director himself is gagged, but the message still gets out.

Redacted won the Silver Lion at the Venice festival, and it will be released at Christmas.