(Reviews of Grand Theft Hamlet; The Commander; and Never Look Away)
GRAND THEFT HAMLET.
For someone who, many moons ago, had redrafted William Shakespeare's Hamlet as a vampire chiller, the realisation that Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane had made Grand Theft Hamlet felt like a gut punch. But this animated documentary is so guilelessly splendid that any grudges soon melted away to be replaced by idiotically indulgent grins.
During Britain's third Covid lockdown in January 2021, actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen are playing Grand Theft Auto when they stumble across the Vinewood Bowl amphitheatre while escaping from the Los Santos police after a mindless casino shooting. As they explore, they decide to stage a production of Hamlet within the game world and announce a performance date. Within a few lines of the first scene, however, audience members start shooting at the pair and they get the giggles as the text about a quiet watch on the battlements of Elsinore clash with a gun battle with some helicopter cops that culminates in Sam's avatar being wasted.
Convinced they're on to a winner, Sam persuades film-making partner, Pinny, to help them document their experiences of being virtual producers. Connecting with her inner Tilda Swinton, Pinny creates an avatar and is interviewing Sam and Mark at Vinewood, when they are approached by Co3lho, who shoots them. He sends a friend request and comes to Sam's apartment to learn more about the project. However, he vanishes the second Mark completes the `Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow' soliloquy and they wonder whether they're wasting their time.
Having posted a beach video inviting players to an audition, Mark and Sam are frustrated when no one shows up. When Sam goes for a wee, Mark reveals that he has been to Holland for his paternal aunt's funeral and Pinny is saddened to hear he is now the last of his bloodline. He is discussing coping with the pandemic as a single fortysomething when DJPhil joins them. Despite looking like a shirtless man in a top hat, he is controlled by a mother and literary agent (Nemonie Craven Roderick) using her nephew's GTA because she loves Hamlet and is intrigued by the idea of staging it virtually in a world every bit as violent as that of Shakespeare's. She reads a speech and celebrates by gunning down Sam and joking that she should get Claudius while her aim is true.
Sadly, she goes home and they lose touch with her. But the audition brings Nora (Danielle James), Shamir Sanni, Tilly Steele, Sam Forster, Jeremiah O'Connor (a historical cook, and Jen Cohn to the venue, along with Gareth Turkingson, who claims to have a face for radio and a voice for mime. Lizzie Wofford is a voice artist and does a speech from Julius Caesar complete with throat-cutting motions. Rocking an alien avatar, ParTebMosMir turns out to be a half-Finnish man from Tunisia and he recites a passage from the Qu'ran. Finally, Mark's football friend, Dipo Ola, does a speech from Othello and they producers are surprised by the calibre of respondee they have attracted.
Sam sets up a company called Elsinore and the cast assembles for a read through at his offices. They have chosen Dipo to play Hamlet, but he gets gunned down by Fred Dog while performing on the roof and Mark curses that it's going to be very boring if gun-toting idiots are going to keep intruding. Worse still, when they meet him at a subway station to recce locations, Dipo announces that he's got a real job because lockdown is ending and he's not going to have the time to play the lead. Sam wonders if they should jack things in, but Mark wants to keep going, as the project has kept him sane during his long hours alone.
Sam thinks Mark should play the Dane, but he's the one who goes scouting locations to deliver `To be or not to be'. He perches on a rock in an oncoming tide and struts in boxer shorts in a clothes shop. But nowhere feels right and a driver they chat to (who has just broken his leg) doesn't feel in the right place to consider life's big questions. Mark admits it's weighty stuff and suggest the speech is more of a guy thing, as men tend to bottle things up and let them fester.
Eventually, Sam finds a dive bar in a rough part of town and swerves a brawl to ponder a giant python in a glass tank. Suddenly inspired after being killed by a cop, he reads the lines as lower-rung individuals mill round him on the street outside and he feels ready to play the role. Gareth has also found a way into Claudius, while Nora confides at a rehearsal that she has just come out as trans to her family and can relate to Hamlet's search for his own truth.
ParTeb offers to provide security for the show and patrols in a fighter plane. Meanwhile, the masked and top-hatted DontaeIsBetter comes along to watch and Sam and Mark are so pleased with an Act III rehearsal that they thank him for being such a good spectator. BTRaiderZ also becomes a key part of the group, with Sam considering him a kind of superhero stage manager, as he comes coming to their rescue whenever they need him. Unfortunately, he can't prevent Sam from plummeting to the ground when he misses his step on to a giant blimp for an airborne scene.
Jerry also falls off while preparing to play Old Hamlet's ghost and we see him driving a flying car, as he muses on the fact that the GTA setting makes it feel as though Elon Musk has thrown billions at the production. He can't believe that no one has thought of this setting before and he is as excited as the rest of the cast when Sam and Pinny discuss the fact that some big name actors might look in to see how they do. However, the real-life partners have their moments of tension when he forgets her birthday and she makes it clear that he is neglecting her and the kids because he is spending so much time in the game.
Having bought a giant plane without knowing what he is going to do with it, Sam feels troubled by the words of Hamlet's speech,
`What a piece of work is a man!', as he can see parallels between the real and the GTA worlds, with their beauty and grotesque violence bringing out the best and worst in people.
On 4 July 2022, without once performing the play all the way through, the company assembles to do their best and make the most of some wonderfully imaginative settings. Sam admits those guests waiting to come into the GTA realm, while Mark announces that the YouTube and Instagram links are live. He can't resist a chuckle when everyone on the blimp dies at the end of the opening battlements scene, but the rest of the show goes without a hitch and Pinny is the first to applaud before everyone decamps to dance at Dontae's nightclub. Mark and Sam promise to keep in touch, as the former logs out. But we get to see them for real, as Grand Theft Hamlet wins at the Stage Awards at the Drury Lane Theatre in 2023.
It's a fitting end to a bold and innovative enterprise, which confirms that Bill the Bard had it right when he said all the world's a stage. Nowadays, however, the entire virtual world is available for strolling players to strut their stuff - because, as this playfully challenging actuality confirms, we are all playing parts and making entrances and exits until our final curtain falls.
Despite a couple of linking scenes between Sam and Mark and the birthday argument with Pinny feeling a bit stage-managed (she's co-directing, filming, and editing the feature for goodness sake, so it's not like they're not in it together), there is a sweep-along spontaneity to the picture that is made all the more enjoyable by the oddball nature of some of the walk-by intruders roaming the online, multi-player universe and by the growing willingness of the cast members to open up about themselves and why they sought out such an unusual project.
While the visuals are down to GTA, they are deftly edited by Pinny Grylls, while the music and sound design by James Perera deepens the textural ambience so that viewers feel submerged in the sights and sounds being experienced by the players and their avatars. They also help Crane and Oosterveen make a 422 year-old play feel wholly relevant to the pandemic generation, which had to confront mortality on a global scale that had not been witnessed for over a century.
Likely to amuse video-sceptics and techno-novices than hardcore gamers, this has a can-do spirit that and a readiness to accept people for who they are - in real and virtual scenarios - that infuses the film with an optimism to match its intelligence, empathy, and occasional laugh-out-loud ridiculousness. Ultimately, the rest is silence. But one does hope that Crane selling t-shirts emblazoned with his line, `If I could just request that you refrain from killing each other.' They could change the world.
THE COMMANDER.
Despite the Pact of Steel between Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, Italy only entered the Second World War on 10 June 1940. Thus, the Royal Italian Navy had only been at combat stations for a few months at the start of Edoardo Di Angeli's The Commander, which was chosen to open the Venice Film Festival after Luca Guadagnino's Challengers was withdrawn because of industrial action in Hollywood.
Ignoring the entreaties of his wife, Rina (Silvia D'Amico), Salvatore Todaro (Pierfrancesco Favino makes light of a debilitating back problem (dating from a plane crash in 1933) to take command of the newly commissioned submarine, Cappellini. On the quay, he presents each crew member with a knife for hand-to-hand combat and urges them to embrace their fear in order to face the foe with raw courage and camaraderie. He also sends one sailor home, as he senses he is ill and will need hospital care.
Todaro is an unconventional skipper, who meditates in his cabin and has a poetic intensity that inspires loyalty among his crew, even Venetian Vittorio Marcon (Massimiliano Rossi), who worries that Todaro is taking the danger of passing through the Straits of Gibraltar too lightly. He considers the course chosen to be tighter than `a chicken's arse' and volunteers to dive down when the submarine becomes entangled. But Vincenzo Stumpo (Gianluca Di Gennaro) insists on going to bring pride to Torre del Greco and conducts a conversation with his father, as he realises that his mission is going to cost him his life.
When they surface to assess the damage, Todaro orders music to be played through the loudspeakers and tells the chef to prepare gnocci to boost morale. They are attacked from the air and Todaro personally stitches the head wound that Sardinian gunner Antonio Mulargia (Andrea Ferrara) receives in shooting down the plane. Rather than celebrate boisterously, however, the crew eat their dinner in appreciative silence. Within a week, however, Neapolitan chef Gigino Magnifico (Giuseppe Brunetti) is stretching the rations and reciting the names of dishes to make the thin gruel more appetising. The odd spark flies, such as when a devout Catholic fails to see the funny side of a blasphemous joke. But Todaro confides to Rina that he is proud to command a bunch of men who represent the diversity of an Italy that has not perhaps fulfilled the potential of Il Risorgimento.
Surfacing in the Atlantic on 16 October, Cappellani was shelled by the Belgian steamer, Kabalo, and Todaro orders retiliatory fire. Despite losing one of his men, the skipper feels obliged to pick up the 26 survivors when their lifeboat disintegrates, as they are hundreds of miles from land. He tells the crew that he is disobeying orders to take them to sanctuary on Santa Maria in the Azores, but takes full responsibility for his decision. He will share his cabin with Georges Vogels (Johan Heldenbergh), who is relying on Jacques Reclercq (Johannes Wirix-speetjens) to translate. However, some of the Belgians will have to go in the conning tower and take what comes if they have to dive.
When two Belgians sabotage the electrics, Tolado has them slapped by everyone onboard and places them in the conning tower for risking everyone's safety. His stock rises further when they encounter a British patrol and Todaro radios to request safe passage for his guests and the bombardment ceases. To celebrate, Reclercq teaches the chef to make French fries and Magnifico responds by singing a song on his mandolin that has everyone singing and clapping along.
On reaching Salt Island, Vogels confesses that he was carrying aircraft parts for the British and asks why Todaro had spared them. He insists it was because they are Italians and tells Vogels to get his four children to pray for Uncle Salvatore. Closing captions reveal that he never got to see his own daughter, as he was hit by British gunfire on 14 December 1942. All of the Belgians survived the war and Vogels and Reclercq visited Rina as a mark of respect.
There was nothing particularly subtle about the propagandist combat movies churned out by Hollywood during the war. But the studio journeymen knew how to use broad brushstrokes to delineate the personalities of the everymen who were about to see action. Many of the stories traded in archetypes, but they were scripted in a way to ensure the audience could readily latch on to each character and know what to expect of them. Here, De Angelis and co-scenarist Sandro Veronesi (who had access to the Todaro family archive) opt not to use such serviceable shorthand and, consequently, the majority of the Cappellani crew remain ciphers whose antics and heroics lack individuality.
This shouldn't matter, as Todaro sought to forge a crew mentality. But he makes a point in a letter to his wife about the contrasting regional temperaments and only those able to discern the varying accents will spot the nuances. Some of the film's dating also seems problematic (although this could be down to ignorance on this writer's part). Hitler violated Belgian neutrality in May 1940 and took just 18 days to subjugate the country. The film has Todaro claiming five months later that Belgian shipping should have been neutral. Yet, the Kriegsmarine failed to capture a proportion of the Belgian mercantile fleet and the government in exile placed it at the disposal of the Allies. Thus, Vogels was carrying a cargo bound for Britain under a Belgian flag as an act of resistance - which makes it all the more puzzling that a caption claims that Belgium entered the war alongside Britain seven days after the sinking of the Kabalo. Surely the exiled regime would not have waited so long to issue act of defiance over the occupation of its country?
Whatever the truth of the situation, Di Angeli has produced a fine tribute to an honourable man and a brave warrior. He has also, of course, slipped in an allegorical reference to the migrant crisis and the fact that civilised nations do not abandon those adrift at sea (`because we're Italians', indeed). Pierfrancesco Favino capably conveys Todaro's nobility, while Carmine Guarino's production design and Ferran Paredes Rubio's cinematography capture the cramped conditions and the impact they had on the psyche of the crew. Several reviews have drawn comparisons with Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot (1981). But this feels closer in spirit to such British submarine sagas as Anthony Asquith's We Dive At Dawn (1943) and Roy Ward Baker's Morning Departure (1950).But neither contained scenes of the captain's scantily clad wife playing `Cavalleria Rusticana' on the piano or a score composedby a former member of Massive Attack.
NEVER LOOK AWAY.
New Zealander Lucy Lawless will always be synonymous with the cult action series, Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001). However, she makes an impressive transition to directing documentaries with Never Look Away, a profile of compatriot and intrepid video journalist Margaret Moth. Indeed, this would make a fine double bill with either Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson (2016) or Matthew Heineman's A Private War (2018), which starred Rosamund Pike as Marie Colvin.
Journalist Stefano Kotsonis recalls how Moth came alive in combat zones and had a fearlessness that enabled her to capture `the messy, human reality of war'. But Lawless ducks back to 1990 to meet Jeff Russi, the high school geek and pizza parlour gopher who became her lover when she was working for Houston's KHOU TV channel after having become the first news camerawoman in her homeland. He recalls dropping acid at weekends, hanging out in punk clubs, rollerskating, and skydiving with a woman who was almost twice his age and who thrilled him with her `don't be boring' mantra.
Colleague and lover Joe Duran jokes that she looked like Joan Jett's big sister and that she wasn't cut out for covering workaday stories, as she carried her camera like a bazooka and `wanted to be where the shit was happening'. Her aim was to land a gig on CNN and former CEO Tom Johnson confirms that she was the one woman who could hold her own in a man's world.
Parking Russi with her customary frankness, Moth left the Dallas agency to cover the Gulf War in Kuwait in 1990. Indeed, she felt so at home during Operation Desert Storm that she became cigar buddies with General Norman Schwarzkopf and developed such a reputation for hard-nosed professionalism that even CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour admits to having been intimidated by her. BBC cameraperson Susan Stein and CNN producer Sausan Ghoshen also speak admiringly of her courage, instinct, and ever-readiness, while Kotsonis reflects on the up-close graphicness of her imagery, which refused to let the viewer off lightly, as she shone a spotlight on people behaving badly.
In Saudi Arabia in 1991, Moth met French sound recordist Yaschinka and the unpredictability of being under fire threw them together. Russi insists he was just a casual companion and little more than a heroin-addicted rush to make the comedown after a dangerous assignment more bearable. Kotsonis concurs that witnessing warfare complicates civilian life and that's why Moth volunteered for every perilous posting, such as the one to Tbilisi in 1991, where she was the only cameraperson who refused to take cover as soldiers fired on a crowd during the civil war.
Kotsonis was awed by her fortitude, but also perplexed by Moth's sudden and sometimes reckless outbursts, such as the time in Bagdad when she slapped a Ba'athist official who had shoved her camera into her face while she was filmed a crowd of young children, who had clearly never seen anything like her before. Looking back, Kotsonis realises that her fury must have been rooted in a trauma she had suffered in her youth in the North Island town of Gisborne.
Russi shows some black ink drawings that Moth had done depicting children in Gothic situations that he was certain reflected her past, as blonde-haired Margaret Wilson, who renamed herself after the thing that frightened her most and went to court to win the right to be sterilised because she never wanted to conceive (`I'm not a breeder'). Sister Jan Wilson confides that neither parent ever told their kids they loved them and siblings Ross and Shirley reveal that their mother's eyes would `go black like a demon' when she lashed out at them with hairbrushes, razor strops, and buckled belts.
Seeking another mission, as the Soviet bloc unravelled, Moth went to Sarajevo in 1992, where she recorded civilians being targeted in Sniper Alley. Amanpour remembers the risks she took and CNN colleague Peter Humi explains that the press were targets for the first time in Bosnia. Moth was warned that she was playing Russian Roulette by staying so long in the city, but she insisted on doing her job.
As we see a model of a Sarajevo street, Stein and Kotsonis describe driving in convoy and how Moth was hit in the face by a Serbian bullet. She was rushed to hospital and underwent a four-hour operation before being airlifted Stateside. Duran recalls visiting her and being shocked by the damage to her jaw and the loss of her teeth and part of her tongue. She could communicate by note and asked for Yaschinka to visit her. However, he fell foul of her mother and sisters, who accused him of stealing from her apartment to feed his heroin addiction. He had started a new relationship and felt conflicted about leaving for Paris. But, such was Moth's need for him that he had to fly back, as she feared she had become monstrous and unlovable.
With Russi being too screwed with drunk and drugs to offer any support, Moth went to Paris, where Yaschinka had started a family with his new partner, Édith. Humi and the CNN bureau kept her busy, as she could still handle a camera and insisted on returning to action after a six-month convalescence. But she couldn't talk easily and kept drooling when she tried. Yet, she refused to feel sorry for herself and Kotsonis opines that she worked harder to make things easier for those around her so that they wouldn't have to make allowances for her.
Determined to resume her career, Moth took assignments in Rwanda and Zaire and even returned to Bosnia. In Ramallah, she was shot in the foot by a member of the Israeli Defense Force, but was back in Northern Israel to cover Hezbollah rocket attacks from Lebanon in 1996. Indeed, it was Moth's coverage of an air attack on the UN base at Qana that alerted the world to the fact that civilians were being mercilessly targeted. For someone who didn't want to be a mother, she had great empathy for children in war zones and she felt an obligation to report on their behalf.
On the day the ceasefire was to begin, Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel and the CNN journalists feared a reprisal. Moth went on to the roof to be ready to record incoming fire and Humi notes that there was almost disappointment when nothing happened. Amanpour claims such heroic reportage helps change global attitudes to crises and brings about direct interventions. This is Moth's legacy and striving to sustain it enabled her to retain her dignity after her shooting.
Having gone through 25 surgeries, Moth discovered she had terminal cancer and died at the age of 59 in 2010. Russi was able to reconnect during her last days, when Duran was also at her side and felt humbled by her lack of fear. She certainly comes across as a remarkable person in this considered portrait, which has the humility to accept that, while it's possible to chronicle the events of Moth's life, it's almost impossible to know or understand her to any great depth.
Lawless and editor Whetham Allpress make astute use of archive footage to show how Moth put herself at the centre of so many storms. But they also allow the contributors to ground the story by recalling Moth's foibles and flaws, as well as her sense of unfolding history and her mission to expose the horror, cruelty, and calculation of conflict. Just occasionally, the revelations about her private life have a voyeuristic tinge. But it's clear that Moth lived voraciously and ferociously and felt no shame about anything she did, as she adhered to her own distinctive kohl'd code of morality. You wouldn't put it past her to be debating right now with Tim Hetherington who got the best send off, with Lawless's unflinchingly intelligent tribute or Sebastian Junger's Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? (2013).
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