All through the past year, there has been a constant downpour of feature films and series on the impact of the Covid pandemic. Four very serious British films made me wonder if it is too close to the crisis for us to appreciate films about it.
So many films and serials based on the Pandemic have begun to make their way onto various OTT platforms, that it (the Pandemic) has begun to feel like a formula for excess. Using a civilizational calamity to foster instant art is not always an undesirable eventuality.
I can’t express an equal level of appreciation for director Jack Thorne’s Help, a Pandemic drama originally made for Channel 4 now, after its steep dramatic impact, available on various OTT platforms. Help does not aspire to be the Schindler’s List of the pandemic era. But it does raise some serious issues on healthcare during the time of Covid crisis when the State machinery gave way to a complete collapse. Help is set in a healthcare home for the old and the abandoned in Liverpool UK. While it tackles a serious health situation and its deplorably disaffected aftermath, it is also a redemptive story of one woman Sarah, played with disconcerting authenticity by Jodie Comer, who finds her inner strength and a sense of purpose while she struggles with the larger crisis.
This was the redemptive formula used in the Malayalam film Oru Kuprasidha Payyan where Thomas Tovino stands trial for murder while his novice lawyer (Nimisha Sajayan) struggles to find coherence in her life amidst the chaos around her. In Help, Jodie Comer’s Sarah’s struggle is far more complex. Her parents especially her father think of her as a wastrel. Sarah takes up the job in a care home more out of boredom than any sincere compassion for the aged and the ailing. And you know what, she actually likes her job! Sarah’s actual journey into self-realisation begins when the pandemic kicks in. Suddenly Sarah has more responsibility on her shoulders than she can bear.
There is this effulgently shot sequence on a night when there is no other staff around (they’ve all either fled or fallen ill). A patient takes a turn for the worse. Sarah has no option but to take the help of another patient, a borderline-line Alzheimer’s patient Tony (Stephen Graham). As the two struggle to keep the dying man alive through a long dark night, the whole passage of the one-night crisis becomes a metaphor for the larger pandemic pandemonium. In that one night’s binge of despair anxiety and heartbreak, director Marc Munden condenses the seemingly endless loop of hopelessness in which mankind is trapped.
Towards the bleak finale, the film takes Sarah and Tony out of the care space into the arms of Nature. This is where the film begins to look aspirational. Finally, though, Help ends on an ominous and despondent note where we are informed that all care centres were more or less abandoned by the British government during the Pandemic. Blending personal anguish with ruthless politics Help gives us one of the most chilling views of what it meant to be old sick and neglected during the Pandemic.
Co-directors Steven Kanter, Henry Loevner ‘s The End Of Us is much lighter in tone. Covid inspired romcoms are like virus-shaped vegetable dishes: they are fun only to those who seek playschool-level enjoyment in torment. I have seen three English-language Covid-inspired couple-breakups films with terrific actors trying to hold together what looks like an excuse to keep the cameras rolling and kitchen fires burning during the pandemic.
In Stephen Daldry’s Together, James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan shout themselves hoarse at each other raising frazzled memories of Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore in Basu Bhattacharya’s Aavishkar. Before this, there was that other charming….pardon me, annoying Anne Hathaway-Chiwetel Ejiofor breakup drama Locked Down after the first wave when things seemed much bleaker. They were all but spitting at one another.
I liked The End Of Us better than the other two lockdown anti-romcoms. For one it is breezier more effervescent in tone even when the theme is nastily negative. But the couple looks committed to keeping the proceedings agreeable even as their relationship cracks up in front of us. When we first meet Nick (Ben Coleman) and Leah (Ali Vingiano) they are sick of each other after months of being locked down together. We gather from their catfights and verbal duels (Covid’s new normal: backstories told rather than shown) that Nick is a struggling actor and his failed auditions have nothing to do with the pandemic. He’s just made a habit of messing up his auditions and Leah is done with his tantrums.
The fun part of the breakup is that they have to stay under the same roof as Nick has nowhere else to go. Even his close relatives are heard telling him on the phone that there is no room for him in their house. Nick has the decency to not feel hurt: he knows how irksome his presence can be.
So the couple must bear with each other somehow: interrupted phone calls (“Do you mind, some of us are trying to study”) , taunts about stolen comfort creams (“Your face is looking abnormally supple”)and worse snub of all: changed Netflix password…Nick faces the fury of a woman scorned…well, if not scorned then certainly spurned.
There are just two major actors in the film (pandemic moderation). The rest are mainly incidental figures and voices that come and go reminding us that the two squabbling ex-lovers are luckier than they think. Unlike the seasoned troopers in Locked Down and Together, Ben Coleman and Ali Viangiano in The End Of Us are relative newcomers. They bring a fresh-faced immediacy to their domestic battle.
Stephen Daldry Together is masked-down lockdown marital drama and a crashing bore. I should have been warned by the utterly fake fireworks that Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor threw at one another in director Doug Liman’s lockdown marital crisis film Locked Down last year. Some misguided sense of optimism propelled me towards another slugfest between two very talented actors posing as a couple on the brink of breakup during the lockdown.
Now, I must confess I am not a James McAvoy fan. Although he is unquestionably skilled at slicing through his characters’ monstrous run-ins with self-doubt, he remains to me, slightly annoying his sweaty personality, like the Jamaican stunner Lashana Lynch in No Time To Die. You know, that guy or girl at a party who will come forward and befriend you, tell you jokes you don’t want to hear, fetch you a drink and insist he/she is intelligent enough to give you company? That’s McAvoy for you. No matter how good looking personable and articulate there is something vaguely irritating about such people. I had no problems at all in buying into his screen-wife’s hurled accusations in Together about the husband (addressed simply as ‘He’) being a pain in the ass. In fact, as played by the wonderful Sharon Horgan (wasn’t she the life and soul of the series Catastrophe?) the wife’s pungent perspective stuck home because McAvoy seems to be all of what she says he is.
The film is less than 90 minutes in length but seems to go on much longer. Watching a couple fight during the pandemic in the house next door would probably make more sense. You know they are doing it out of boredom. This is London during the pandemic. Extraneous characters and noises are shut out as McAvoy and Horgan shout out to one another with accusations and insults that have a history that we do not really care to know. Even if we do, their belligerent bickering is unintelligible to the outsider. Admittedly there are passages where the two strong lead players lead us into their characters’ mutual hostility to ferret out love that bound them together in the past. Morgan is especially persuasive when she talks about her mom dying in Covid isolation in the hospital. But such episodes where the hefty hostility is halted, are rare. For a large part of the slinging march, all we get is impenetrable sarcasm and a growing sense of a doomed marriage and a partnership which has gone into remission during these hard times.
There is also a specially-abled child sauntering around somewhere in the background, not saying a word. How can he? When his parents are so voluble they sound like roosters circling each other during the mating season. I remember a special child in the brilliant director Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Extremely loud, the couple in Together certainly is. Incredibly close to despair is where they leave us.
Doug Liman’s Locked Down is born out of a place of anxiety, not love. It shows. Two of the most charismatic actors the American Anne Hathaway and British Chiwetel Ejiofor get together for what looks like a pretext to promote the London departmental store Harrods. That this exasperating rom-com celebrating the yawn-sambandh between two such watchable actors is written by Steven Knight who wrote 2019’s worst reviewed film Serenity (which too starred the gorgeous Hathaway) comes as no surprise.
Locked Down is a mess that cannot be explained away by the circumstances in which it was written and directed. Who asked these people to get resourceful at a time when the world shut down the enterprising spirit? This is a one-note hastily written heist story about Linda and Paxton whose marriage is on the rocks. Paxton wants nothing more than to get on his two-wheeler in the garage and rev down the roads of London. Since he can’t, he goes out on the streets and recites TS Eliot’s poem and spars with his boss (Ben Kingsley, in one the many home-bound cameos) on video conference.
This film is written purely by numbers. If Ejiofor has Ben Kingsley for his boss, Hathaway must have Ben Stiller. If Kinsley is deadpan funny, Stiller is the same. If Hathaway gets five funny lines in a scene, her co-star must equal that score. The film’s bland servility to the rom-com rules is very difficult to digest. The last 20 minutes move to Harrods for a hasty heist episode at least offers us the solace of some new characters, not to mention a corny homage to American author Edgar Allen Poe. Watching Hathaway and Ejiofor sparring for nearly two hours over such significant subjects as , ‘Should he be allowed to bake bread to break the lockdown boredom?’ and ‘Should she tolerate his meddlesome brother and his wife on video-con just because there is no better diversion?’ is as difficult as being indulgent towards this film just because it was made during the lockdown.
Go bake bread or speak to your brother’s family if you have extra time. Spare yourself the ennui of watching this film. And most of the other Covid-centric films. This is Corona without karuna (empathy).
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