Parky At the Pictures (7/11/2025)

(Reviews of Dragonfly; and The Marbles)

DRAGONFLY.

It's hard to think that Paul Andrew Williams had been making features for two decades. His debut, London to Brighton (2006), feels like it was released yesterday, but he has since

bolstered his reputation for springing surprises with The Cottage (2008), Cherry Tree Lane (2010), and Song For Marion (2012). He returned from a lengthy spell in television with the revenge thriller, Bull (2021), but changes tack completely with Dragonfly, a deceptively trenchant two-hander on the nature of neighbourliness in a country that runs the risk of losing its sense of community

Although she has a home help pop in for an hour thrice weekly, 80 year-old Elsie Richards (Brenda Blethyn) is left to potter round her bungalow in a small town in post-industrial West Yorkshire. Colleen Dodd (Andrea Riseborough) lives next door with Sabre, an imposing-looking bully cross-breed with a softish personality. She also has a nose for mischief and digs up the flowers in Elsie's front garden. having run the odd errand in the past, Colleen feels responsible and buys some replacements, stopping for a chat over a cuppa after she plants them.

Elsie is nervous of Sabre, but Colleen reassures her and they are soon nattering each day. In addition to going shopping, Colleen also hangs out the washing and chides an agency worker when she ends her visit early. Elsie appreciates the company, even though Colleen is a little brusque and socially awkward. When another care worker admits while showering her to not knowing Elsie's name, she asks her to leave and Colleen helps her get dry and offers to take over the caring duties over tea and toast.

Son John (Jason Watkins) is so suspicious down the phone that he feels the need to pay an unscheduled call, as he doesn't want anybody taking advantage. But Elsie feels as though she is maintaining her independence by letting Colleen help her, even though she notices how Colleen bridles at the thought of being naked in front of a stranger. From the `Love Lies Here' sign over her bed, we get the impression that Colleen has been scarred by a past experience. but she's very guarded when it comes to personal details, with only her attempts to follow make-up tips online offering any insight into her personality.

Persuading Elsie to trust her with her card pin, Colleen becomes fixated with the contents of the top drawer of her dressing-table. Indeed, she has to give herself a pep talk to behave herself after Elsie cooks her a sausage lunch and Colleen reveals that she was abandoned by her mother at eight and has been kept by the state ever since. With nothing better to do, she simply plonks a plastic-backed chair on the patio and dares the world to pass comment as it idles by.

On a shopping trip, Colleen gets angry with a bank clerk because she's been charged an overdraft fee. But she cheers herself up by pawning a watch any buying a two-way radio set to use with Elsie. She's with John when Colleen calls and she goes on the defensive when he tries to sound her out to ensure his mother's in safe hands. As he's unwilling to make more effort himself, he accepts the situation when Colleen insists that helping Elsie gives her a purpose.

But the smarmily bourgeois John is determined to prove his superiority over the sponging neighbour (having just been made redundant so he will lose his swish company car) and he reports Sabre as an illegal breed. Colleen is tasered when the cops come to confiscate the dog and she refuses to talk to Elsie on the walkie-talkie after she gets home late at night. However. she is there peering through the glass when John calls the next morning to boast about his deed and Elsie is horrified to wake to find her lawn covered in the contents of a dumpster.

Elsie is taken aback to find Colleen sitting at the end of her bed during the night, but she refuses to press charges when John tells her to be careful. Indeed, she is cross with him when he reports the vandalism and the intrusion and the police call at the bungalow. A few hours later, Elsie gets a call from her daughter-in-law asking where John is, but she doesn't know and is appalled when Debbie rings back to inform her that his body has been found in his car. Finding Colleen in the kitchen with some tarts, Elsie notices she's bleeding, but still slips in the blood after Colleen slashes her wrist.

As the film ends, we see Elsie sitting alone in an old people's home. She refuses tea and stares ahead, as though still trying to process what has happened to prise her out of her home of 50 years. We learn nothing more about Colleen, however, and, therein lies the flaw in what is otherwise the bleakest Alan Bennett tribute there has ever been (and how apt that Dragonfly should be released into UK cinemas on the same day as The Choral).

Andrea Riseborough's compelling performance leaves us in no doubt that the tightly wound Colleen is a disturbed individual who is as much in need of care as Elsie. But, by leaving the audience to speculate about the events that might have shaped her, the horror aspect of the story short-changes the human drama that had proceeded it. It's less important that we know whether Colleen stole the watch from Elsie's drawer than it is to know what she has endured from the age of eight - otherwise, she just becomes another deranged killer and one who turns out to have been much more dangerous than her daft `apporth of a pet.

Although Blethyn is equally excellent as the lonely Elsie, Williams asks us to accept that she suddenly becomes that little bit less able to cope just as Colleen decides to offer her assistance. After all, we know that she has been living next door for around a year and it's highly unlikely that their paths would not have crossed in the interim. And surely John would have visited since Colleen moved in and would have noticed Sabre's breed (if that had genuinely concerned him)? Most viewers will be prepared to let such details slide, as genre cinema is never quite a precise as social realism. However, there will be those who will consider the sudden lurch to be more melodramatic than authentic.

What also goes unmentioned amidst Vanessa Whyte's leisurely views of the estate is the fact that Elsie seems to know no one in the place she has called home for five decades. Granted, she's housebound. But no old pals drop in to check she's okay, which either suggests she was always a homebody or that the make-up of the area has changed so much in recent times that any semblance of a cogent community has been eroded away.

This is the saddest aspect of a film that will be remembered primarily for its audacious denouement over the impeccable performances, the jarring interjections of Raffertie's score, and the precision of Kay Brown's production design (`So weird. It's exactly like mine, just the other way round.'). But it affirms that Williams is one of the most intriguing British directors on the spectrum from Ken Loach to Ben Wheatley and means that his next outing will be all the more eagerly anticipated.

THE MARBLES.

Prior to becoming a documentary director a decade ago, David Nicholas Wilkinson had been involved in various aspects of cine-culture. In The First Film (2015), he revealed how a mysterious disappearance from a Paris-bound train prevented Louis Aimé Augustine Le Prince from establishing that he had photographed the first moving images in Leeds in October 1888. Subsequently, however, Wilkinson has been more advocatorial in examining the ramifications of Brexit in Postcards From the 48% (2018) and exposing the war criminals who have avoided prosecution for their part in the Holocaust in Getting Away With Murder(s) (2021). Now, in The Marbles, he turns his attention to the long-running feud between Britain and Greece over the artefacts removed at the turn of the 19th century by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin from the Parthenon in Athens.

Starting shooting in June 2021 to mark the centenary of the Greek War of Independence, Wilkinson is keen for someone from the British Museum to put its case for retaining the Elgin Marbles. He meets actress Janet Suzman at the gates, where she is part of an ongoing protest by one of 19 international committees to secure the return of items whose procurement is shrouded in controversy. Elgin was ambassador to the Ottomon Empire when he sent artists from Italy to make sketches around the Acropolis and, on the basis of their work, he decided to take various pieces into safe-keeping because he didn't believe that the Greeks were capable of protecting them for posterity.

As Suzman compares the architectural sophistication of the Parthenon to the contemporary structure of Maiden Castle in Dorset, Tom Minogue notes the irony of the fact that Elgin's descendants allowed a jetty near the family seat of Broomhall House near Dunfermline to fall into disrepair and then asked the local council for funding to restore it. Minogue believes that Elgin had a shopping list of items to decorate his home and lawyer Mark Stephens and Alexander Herman from the Institute of Art and Law explain how documents were acquired to grant Elgin's artists access to the Acropolis from the Ottoman authorities and how these were used as a pretext for taking artefacts and shipping them back to Britain.

Even in 1816, there was a parliamentary inquiry into the legality of Elgin's actions and, while it found in his favour, the £35,000 asset was rapidly entrusted to the British Museum to avoid a scandal that had been whipped up by the likes of the philhellenic Lord Byron. Elgin's wife divorced him when they were ostracised from polite society and Stephens reveals that he died syphilitic in Parisian exile with a tin nose because the tip had been damaged during mercury treatments.

Wilkinson highlights other looted pieces that had been repatriated, including the `Tiger Ying', a bronze water vessel that had been taken from the Yuanmingyuan (or Old Summer Palace) in Beijing during the 1860 Opium War. The man responsible was the 8th Earl of Elgin and Wilkinson accuses the family of being Britain's worst serial art criminals. He passes through Elgin en route to visiting the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow to learn from Patricia Allan about how the Lakota people reclaimed a Ghost Dance shirt that had been taken from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre. Wilkinson also meets Neil Curtis at the University of Aberdeen to hear about the return of a Benin bronze and discover that Scotland is a world leader in restoring cultural items to their rightful owners.

Somewhat overlooking the fact that the original thief was a Scot, actor Brian Cox can't resist knocking the Sassenachs in declaring that the Marbles should be returned. In an amusing bit of shtick, Wilkinson had Jonathan Guy Lewis impersonate Boris Johnson on the steps of the British Museum quoting from an Oxford student article in which he had supported Greek Oscar-winning actress-turned-culture minister, Melina Mercouri, in her campaign to bring the sculptures home - a stance he has since changed to suit his own reinvention as John Bull.

After novelist Victoria Hislop discusses her stance on the subject, Wilkinson explores how provincial museums have greater latitude in returning things to `source communities', as Tristram Besterman, the retired director of the Manchester Museum outlines how he pioneered a programme to return human remains to Australia. He insists that Parliament could pass legislation to facilitate the return of the Parthenon stones, but it has become a Conservative badge of honour to hang on to them. That said, former Tory chancellor, George Osborne, used his status at the British Museum to open secret talks with Athens about cutting an exchange deal.

Wilkinson attends a protest by the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles and hears Simon Callow, Stockard Channing, Joan Bakewell, Janet Suzman, and Bill Nighy reciting Byron's `The Curse of Minerva' in the Parthenon Galleries in June 2023. Lawyer Dominic Selwood tacks another tack, however, by reminding us of the role that museums play in educating people and fostering a sense of cultural understanding. But his argument feels on shakier ground after the revelation that thousands of items had been systematically stolen from the British Museum over several years. Greek journalist Evdoxia Lymperi expresses her shock at how easily the institution's claim to be a safe repository for humanity could be so easily shattered, as she laments that many of the stolen pieces were broken up for their precious stones or metals..

In 1915, while seeking some curtains at an auction, lawyer Cecil Chubb had acquired Stonehenge with a bid of £6600. Suzman speculates how Brits would have reacted if an American bidder had prevailed and removed the stones to Central Park. Lawyer Melina Antoniadis explains how opinion polls have shifted in favour of returning the Marbles, with many liking the idea of a reciprocal loan from Athens. A growing number of individuals have also started returning items from ancestral collections because `it seemed like the right thing to do'.

But Wilkinson ducks back into the legal complexities of the case to examine the existence or not or a `firman' letter of confirmation granted by the Ottomans to allow Elgin to remove the Marbles. Stephens claims there never was such a document, while Selwood argues that the fact it is now missing doesn't confirm that it never existed. He points to an Italian translation commissioned by Elgin's chaplain, Philip Hunt, but conveniently overlooks the fact this letter gives Elgin no permission to remove anything from the Parthenon.

The Turks have since declared that no firman was ever issued to Elgin. Furthermore, Minogue suggests that the museums and grand houses displaying pieces plundered from ancient burial places are complicit in grave robbery. Lamenting the fact that he never got to travel to Greece, Wilkiinson (who was diagnosed with cancer during the making of the film) describes his own family's involvement with unscrupulous officials in recalling the fate of bible that had been entrusted to Kirkstall Abbey. He also makes the point that he loves the British Museum and hopes it can find a way forward in time.

Ending on a note of quiet optimism that is made all the more poignant by the state of his own heatlh, Wilkinson gives this intelligent and informative film a non-hectoring conclusion that echoes its reasoned and reflective approach to an emotive topic. Speakers like Mark Stephens and Alexander Herman build the legal case against Elgin with a cogency that makes it hard to countermand and they prove to be more effective contributors than higher-profile returners like Brian Cox and Victoria Hislop, who slightly play to the gallery. Dominic Selwood should also be commended for offering a contrary view with awareness and humility and it's a shame that no one from the British Museum felt able to debate the issues on camera.

They would have had a fair hearing, as Wilkinson is not a gotchaing kind of film-maker. Indeed, in order to give everyone a voice, he includes less conventional campaigners like Christopher Stockdale, who initiated a series of charity cycle rides between Bloomsbury and Athens. The odd segment feels superfluous, such as the detour to Bath. But Wilkinson and editor David Hughes always achieve a sense of purposeful momentum with their transition shots of the director striding along streets and corridors en route to the next revelation. Janet Suzman, Paul McGann, and Miriam Margolyes provide key voiceovers, which are complemented by the prowl of Christopher Barnett's atmospheric score. Ultimately, the documentary will do little to move the dial. But it makes for a compelling progress report on an issue whose resolution remains far from assured, in spite of the weight of historical evidence and moral obligation.