Produced, co-written and directed by Michael Winterbottom. He takes us to mandate Palestine (circa 1938 to 1944) for a history lesson about one of Britain's more obviously less successful colonial projects. It seems that as the nation declines her filmmakers spend more effort burnishing those days of greatness, c.f. Steve McQueen's latest, even if they can't suppress their ruefulness.
The focus is on two colonial policemen. Thomas Wilkin (Douglas Booth) tries to support the non (or at least less) violent Jewish groups who are agitating for a state in collaboration with the (sympathetic) British forces. He does this by enforcing the arms ban only on Arabs and the Jewish groups engaged in direct action, and romancing journalist/kibbutznik Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum). Geoffrey Morton (Harry Melling, looking like he'll be playing George Orwell some day soon) has more inflexibly universalist ideas which of course lead to monumental cockups, culminating in what might now be called the extrajudicial killing of all-methods-on-the-table Avraham Stern (Aury Alby).
As usual with Winterbottom this is fabulously shot (here by Giles Nuttgens). At some point I realised I was enjoying baby-faced Booth's performance mostly because he sounds like Richard Burton. There's the faintest of echoes of Graham Greene's A Quiet American — love and clandestine operations during wartime but without the contest for the woman — and more of Zwartboek but less sexy. The longer any scene goes on the more certain that something will explode; this terrorism stuff is not very functional film making. It could've been called many funerals and no wedding.
Peter Bradshaw: what David Lean would've done with the romance.
