It
is a growing concern amongst certain
film
critics that any film that has a target audience other
than 15-35 year old, heterosexual, middle-class men will probably receive a
poor critical review, irrespective of the box office takings or the quality of
the film. The harshest attacks from critics
and the more aggressive side of the twittersphere are usually aimed at cinema
produced for teenage girls, even if they are one of the most vocal audiences at
declaring their love for the films/franchises that they embrace. The tragedy here seems to be the lack of
imagination from other demographics of filmgoers at empathizing enough with
young women/girls in order to enjoy a film that is aimed at them.
MacDonald’s
adaption of Meg Rosoff’s much-loved debut How I Live Now is a film that
unashamedly gets inside the head of it’s teenage protagonist. From the second it opens we hear a cacophony
of teenage angst inside the head of Daisy (Saoirse Ronan), who we then follow
for almost every shot of the film. Daisy
is a 16 year old American girl who has been sent to England for the summer to
spend some time with her 3 cousins, Edmond (George MacKay), Issac (Tom Holland)
and Piper (Harley Bird) and her Aunt Penn, who incidentally works for the UN. She initially resents this move but ends up
falling for the quiet and outdoorsy Eddie.
The narrative thus begins as a teenage love story…
However,
as Daisy begins to integrate more with her new friends, Aunt Penn is called off
to Switzerland as there are rumours of a war breaking out after a bombing in
Paris. Whilst she is gone a nuclear bomb
is detonated in London, which leads to Daisy and Piper being taken to live in a
safe zone with a suburban family, and Eddie and Isaac being taken against their
will to fight the war effort.
MacDonald
addresses the action from a teenage point-of-view – the politics of the lead up
to war is mostly background noise, heard only fleetingly through the television
and Aunt Penn’s computer screen. The
younger sister Piper proclaims at one point that “Mum is an expert in loony
extremists”, which is one of the only exposition hints that the war has been
started due to an act of terrorism. The
other overt references to ‘terrorists’, ‘Marshall law’ and ‘enemy units’, are
spoken clumsily by adult characters in a way that lacks context to a teenage
mind.
The
film then descends into a dystopic wartime Britain that has echoes of the 1930s
as the women are forced to work on farms for the war effort and there are
rations on food and water. There is a
scene where Daisy and Piper are sat around a dinner with their new conservative
‘parents’ eating carrots and potatoes and listening to the war report on the
radio – they might as well have been listening to ye oldy wireless. Eventually they decide to run away back to
Eddie and embark on a journey across the war-torn country to get ‘home’.
The
film maintains a consistent disconnect between the teenagers, who want to
coexist peaceful in the rural idyll and have picnics, go fishing and swim in
rivers, and the adults who seem intent on creating war and abusing young
people. It is worth noting that there
are some serious depictions of war crimes involving young women that are
incredibly hard to watch at moments, even if Daisy manages to get a form of
revenge later.
Rosoff
was probably being politically correct in the novel by not mentioning
specifically who the attack comes from, and giving the enemy anonymity has two
apparent functions: it highlights the decontextualised nature of war to a
teenager/child, and also removes the slippery task of declaring a nation/group
as evil enough to drop a nuclear bomb.
By using this approach, the politically minded viewer is free to
speculate who has brought about world war three: Aunt Penn’s computer screen has a graphic
declaring ‘projected deaths across mainland Europe’ and there is broadcast
footage of a previous bomb being set off in Paris, which hints to a
non-European nation. Also, Daisy is an
American national and is given a safe journey home from the Edinburgh consulate,
which removes the USA. Numerous mentions
are made about ‘terrorists’ and ‘groups’ taking responsibility for the attack,
but the talk of a ceasefire at the end of the film suggests that the
perpetrators have enough of a command structure to be brought to the
negotiating table…
The
film has a mostly gorgeous cinematography of the English countryside,
reminiscent of Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go,
and the narrative fits into the tradition of dark British Sci-Fi films such as 28 Days Later and Children Of Men. But, the most beautiful surprise of the film
was the original soundtrack being composed by Jon Hopkins, who has made some of
the most incredibly luscious electronic albums recently – his ambient stamp
made the film beautifully cinematic in the truest sense of the word.
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