Film REVIEWS
DVD
TV DRAMA The old school fares well against the newbies in a spring of intriguing TV drama releases
The Governor ●●●●● features a curious performance from Janet McTeer, just four years before her 1999 Oscar nomination for Tumbleweeds. In the first season of Lynda La Plante’s excellent prison drama, she switches between giggling schoolgirl and feisty iron lady as she tries to contain the inmate mayhem and official incompetence and cope with being persistently undermined by that nice Charlie Slater – all in between spells of fixing her hair and looking bemused to have been handed the governorship of the maximum security all-male Barfield prison. Season five of the episodic Skins ●●●●● is
generally viewed as a return to form which would make you grateful for missing out on earlier series’. Not especially controversial anymore, it veers more towards boring and annoying with the only saving grace the sweetly curious romance between the ballerina and metalhead. Perhaps the vampire, werewolf and ghost triptych in Being Human ●●●●● had enough of sharing a city (Bristol) with the irritating Skins crew as they hotpawed it to Barry Island for a tumultuous third season. Hopefully one day they’ll sink fangs and claws into Gavin and/or Stacey. Jack Rosenthal at the BBC ●●●●● is a blast from the Play for Today past with the clear highlight being the superb Bar Mitzvah Boy while his widow Maureen Lipman gets plenty of time to reminisce on the DVD extras.
But the pick of the bunch has to be Traffik ●●●●●, the 1989 Channel 4 six-parter which inspired the Hollywood blockbuster from Steven Soderbergh. It has faultless performances from Bill Paterson as the government’s drug tsar whose daughter (Julia Ormond) is hooked on smack, Lindsay Duncan as the manipulative wife of a ‘respectable’ dealer and Jamal Shah as the poppy field worker whose semi-innocent journey into the heart of darkness leads to awful tragedy. There are a couple of ropey performances and the odd clunky scene, but the spaced-out electronica and nerve-shredding slice of Shostakovich which make up the show’s dual soundtrack plus a running children-in-peril motif help make this a vital and unforgettable late 80s cultural artefact. (Brian Donaldson)
56 THE LIST 28 Apr–26 May 2011
THRILLER HANNA (12A) 111min ●●●●●
What a wonderfully curious and beguiling film this is. Hanna is the story of the eponymous 16- year-old (Saoirse Ronan), trained in the arts of combat and survival in the remote wilds of Finland by her ex-CIA father (Eric Bana). Desperate to see the world, she unexpectedly gets her chance when her father’s former bosses close in on them, capturing Hanna and taking her to a maximum security facility where she’s to be interrogated by Cate Blanchett’s ruthless suit. With our heroine promptly escaping, Hanna
mutates into a chase movie, as rogue operatives (led by Tom Hollander, in a bizarre turn as a fey German assassin) pursue their target. But The Bourne Identity for teenagers, this is not. Yes, there are action scenes – and director Joe Wright (who ‘discovered’ Ronan on Atonement)
handles them well enough. But really this is a coming-of-age story, and one of the strangest you’re ever likely to see. Using a holidaying hippie Brit family (led by Olivia Williams and Jason Flemyng) as cover, Hanna befriends their daughter Sophie (Tamara Drewe’s Jessica Barden) and briefly comes to realise what it means to be a normal teenager. She experiences her first kiss, only to wrap the unsuspecting lad up in knots when the impending human contact begins to scare her.
What delights about Hanna is its frequent ability to surprise, from the itchy Chemical Brothers score to the surreal fairytale quality that Wright invests in certain scenes (not least the bizarre ending in a Berlin amusement park). Some of it doesn’t work, such as Blanchett’s rather unconvincing casting. But led by the fantastic Ronan, who just seems to be getting better with every film, Hanna is bold and original. (James Mottram) ■ General release from Fri 6 May.
THRILLER OUTSIDE THE LAW (HORS LA LOI) (15) 138min ●●●●●
Franco-Algerian writer-director Rachid Bouchareb follows his hard-hitting Palme d’Or nominated WWII adventure Days of Glory with this similarly forceful thriller about Algerian freedom fighters in the 1950s. Like its predecessor, this unofficial sequel is at once controversial in subject matter but cleverly commercial in execution. Just as Days of Glory refashioned the secret history of Algerians who fought the Germans on behalf of the French as a men-on-a-mission epic such as Kelly’s Heroes, Outside the Law tells the story of Algerians who take the fight to their colonial oppressors in France in a manner that brings to mind Once Upon A Time in America as much as it does The Battle of Algiers.
Days of Glory stars Roschdy Zem, Sami Bouajila and Jamel Debouzze are reunited to play three brothers who leave their homeland after the notorious Setif massacre in 1945. One of them joins the French army to fight in Indochina, while the other two go to France and disappear into the underground, one as a freedom fighter, the other to run jazz clubs and brothels. However, national pride, a sense of injustice, and family loyalty unite the boys in their common cause. (Miles Fielder) ■ Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Fri 6 May; GFT, Glasgow, Mon 23–Thu 26 May and selected release.