Who's Sorry Now

Rating: 6/10 (7 September 2007)

There's a lovely irony at work here inasmuch as the bulk of the action takes place in the thirties/forties, an age when movies were made for the masses rather than a 'target' audience but even a target audience is no longer sufficient so that today movies like this are what I choose to call Festival Fodder, where the director has one eye on the viewfinder and the other on the Golden Palm, Silver Bear, Bronze Ego Massager or whatever and whilst these films are certainly good for one viewing and attract lots of puffery from 'Arts' programmes and Sunday supplements they seldom stand up to a second viewing a few years later (hands up anyone who can sit through The English Patient again). Joe Wright, current critical flavor of the month, has turned out a decent enough movie and some of the trendiest names in the business - Knightley, McAvoy - are on hand to lend gravitas to the project but significantly the best acting by a country mile is contributed by Vanessa Redgrave at the very end of the movie - in another irony the character she plays is very similar to the one played by her father, Michael, in The Go-Between, i.e. youth grown old and bitter and filled with remorse for lives damaged in earlier decades - and as virtually all of it is shot in close up she has only her face, eyes, and voice to work with. Can you stand more irony? You can, swell; in the Dunkirk segment there's a brief clip from the Marcel Carne/Jacques Prevert Quai des Brumes, featuring Michele Morgan and Jean Gabin (this is mistakenly referred to as Recif de Corail by IMDb; Quai des Brumes was released in 1938 whilst Jean Gremillon's Recif de Corail was interrupted by the war and had not been completed by the time of Dunkirk) a far, far superior film than Atonement and one that was made with both the director's eyes on entertaining the masses, come to think of it, Mr. Wright, THAT's how you make classics, by default rather than design.