The Light Between Oceans

Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) is war veteran returning from WWI to Australia. Haunted by the experience, Tom is intent on withdrawing from the human race completely and he accepts a job as the lighthouse keeper on some desolate island somewhere off the coast of Australia called Janus Rock. 

Before he departs he is given a send-off on the mainland where he meets Isabel (Alicia Vikander), who sees something she quite likes under his ridiculous WWI moustache. Well I guess the post-war man market was probably a bit depleted, so she quickly expresses a desire to get withdrawn and desolate with him on Janus. The only problem is the lighthouse has a wives only policy, so they quickly get married.

It’s an odd match with Vikander very much the toy girl here. In real life she is 28, eleven years Fassbender’s junior, but here she looks about 18 whereas he looks every day of his real age. Which is somewhat sinister for starters. 

Still they start married life on the island and we get treated to scenes of idyllic sex as the waves lap furiously up against the lighthouse. My partner says filmmakers are incapable of making a film with Fassbender without putting a sex scene in for him but in his defence it was Alicia Vikander. What's the guy supported to do? Well, he could at least look like he's enjoying it.

Fassbender’s facial expression doesn’t change much from sad/gloomy during the whole film even when he is getting down to it with Vikander. She at least gives pleasure a go and, after this film, they became a ‘real life’ couple. So she obviously wasn’t faking.

Isabel gets pregnant but has a miscarriage. Then she gets pregnant again but has another miscarriage and it is at almost this exact moment that a rowing boat is seen bobbing up and down close to the lighthouse.

The boat contains a man who is dead and a baby who is not. It is later revealed that the man was German, as if this explains why he would leave his wife, put his baby into a rowing boat and head out on to the ocean before eventually ending up at a lighthouse a hundred or so miles from anywhere. There is no attempt to explain how the husband died while the baby survived this journey.

Isabel’s urge to have children is so great that rather than ask her husband to move back to the mainland where she could get some decent antenatal care, she persuades him not to report the incident, to bury the dead man and to steal the baby to raise as their own. Erm, somewhere of course there is likely to be a grieving mother? No matter, the infant Lucy is raised by them.

 

Four years later, Tom comes across a memorial for a missing man and baby which leads him to find out who the real mother is, namely Hannah Roennfeldt (Rachel Weisz). It really makes you wonder why nothing was in the local paper at the time or perhaps a few ‘missing’ posters? Why did no one say to the lighthouse keeper ‘seen any random rowing boats Tom?’ but implausible plot twists are de rigueur here. Tom promptly goes off to send a note to Hannah to let her know her baby is safe. Pillock.

Then the police gets involved and it all quickly boils down to a murder\kidnapping trial and a nasty custody battle over poor Lucy aka Grace who doesn’t know which mummy to turn to. Well she does and it’s not a popular choice.

There’s still time for more implausible plot twists as Isabel inexplicably puts her husband in jail for the alleged murder of the man in the boat and the film ends up tying itself in such a knot with its own twists and turns that the ending makes even less sense than what has gone before it. 

You’ve probably guessed by now that I didn’t enjoy it that much.

The tagline of this film is ‘you only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day’. I have forgiven my partner for taking me to see this.

The Danish Girl

Set in Copenhagen in the mid-1920s, The Danish Girl is based on the true story of the first person to undergo gender reassignment surgery.

Einar and Gerda Wegener are a seemingly normal couple who are both painters but while Einar (Eddie Redmayne) is a renowned landscape artist, Gerda (Alicia Vikander) is struggling to make an impact with her portraits. On the surface they appear happily married and are trying for a baby. Something which shouldn’t pose too much of a problem as they seem to be jumping each other at every opportunity.

When one day Gerda is struggling to hit a deadline and needs a female model but one isn’t available, she asks Einar to put a dress on and stand in. When he does, they both seem to like it. From that point onwards Gerda encourages him to dress up in her clothes and wear her makeup. She seems to see it as a sort of a kinky dressing up game and indeed, at first, most of the time it ends up with them in bed. When she catches him secretly wearing her lingerie under his clothes, she likes that too and again they end up having sex.

They start going out in public with him dressed up as a woman, now known as ‘Lili’ and no one suspects that it is really Einar. I don’t know how well the real Lili passed for a woman but Redmayne's Lili was far from convincing, undeniably a man in a wig and the only person he/she gets a reaction from is a gay man (Ben Whishaw) who he inadvertently pulls. Which doesn’t go down too well with his wife.

Gradually it becomes clear that Einar isn’t so much keen to get his wife out of her underwear but to get into it himself as he becomes more and more obsessed about what it would be like to be a woman. I find it hard to believe this is how you discover that you are transgender as I thought it was something you grappled with almost from childhood but what do I know. Perhaps he did but the film doesn’t tell us. 

They seek help for Einar but the doctors either prescribe shock treatment or want to lock him up. Eventually they find a more open minded doctor who suggests that Einar become part of his experiments into gender reassignment. This leads Einar to submit to a succession of untried medical procedures which will eventually kill him.

This may have started out as a film about a transgender man but where the film actually excels is in its telling of the story of a woman who is married to someone who isn’t who she thought they were.

Saint Gerda takes everything that is thrown at her in her stride and that is some achievement. Gerda is not the successful artist in the family and it is only when she starts painting portraits of ‘Lili’ that she finally starts to get noticed as an artist. This perhaps goes some way to making up for gradually losing her husband.

When Einar decides he wants to become Lili she just goes with it even though her own needs are often compromised along the way. At times it’s painful to watch as he thoughtlessly withdraws himself from her until eventually he leaves her totally alone. Yet Gerda’s devotion to her marriage and to her husband is unflinching even when Einar’s childhood friend, Hans (Matthias Schoenaerts), expresses a clear interest in the sexually frustrated wife. Come the sad ending, she is still there by his bedside.

This is Gerda’s film or more precisely its Alicia Vikander film. While Eddie Redmayne seemed somewhat overwhelmed by his role, which seemed to consume him and then spit him out the other side, Alicia Vikander totally owned her role. I suppose it didn’t help that I kept looking at Redmayne and seeing Stephen Hawking in drag, which isn’t a great vision, but there’s no getting away from the fact that Vikander is fantastic here.

Of course in real life Gerda was herself bisexual and painted lesbian erotica but this wasn’t mentioned in the film. Not sure what the Academy Awards committee would have made of that.

Ex Machina

Nathan Bates (Oscar Isaac again, this time hiding behind a bushy beard), the wealthy CEO of the world's leading search engine BlueBook (aka Google), is a recluse living out in the wilderness (aka Norway).

Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is a young whiz kid who works for BlueBook and wins the company lottery with the prize being to spend a week with Nathan at his luxury home aka research facility. A place that can only be reached by travelling for many hours by helicopter. 

Nathan is a one man research project into the development of Artificial Intelligence. That’s robots to you and me. Caleb has been summoned (or more correctly selected) to perform the 'The Turing Test' on his creation, to see if it can genuinely pass itself off as human to another human.

Nathan introduces Caleb to the beautifully assembled Ava (Alicia Vikander again, this time hiding behind a lot of wires and cables) because, of course, Nathan only makes female robots. 

The only other person in the house is Nathan's maid Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), who speaks no English but seems a dab hand with a duster, a frying pan and at providing other essential ‘services’.

Through a series of meetings Caleb interrogates and tests Ava, whilst Nathan watches on CCTV and get drunk. However it is soon Ava who ends up being the one doing the interrogating and testing. 

Caleb finds himself constantly manipulated by both the increasingly eccentric Nathan and his pretty machine, and ends up underestimating both of them. He begins to lose his mind as he finds out more about Nathan’s research and as Ava starts to flirt with him.

The film as the combination of a robot with amazing self-awareness that is determined not to have its plug pulled, your archetypal mad professor type and the classic confined/remote location scenario. This was never going to end well.

Oh and there’s a lot of full frontal nudity which could be shocking to some if these were actual real women and not robots of course. Although Ava does seem to have a bit of a problem with her own shrinking assets as the film goes on.

It’s another excellent film, we seem to be on a roll at the moment. Lots of philosophical plotting, very thought provoking and tense in places. Quite similar in many ways to last year’s ‘Under the Skin’ but miles better.

Both Isaac and Gleeson are good but its Alicia Vikander, seemingly a bit wooden in ‘Testament of Youth’, who steals the film. Unlike the script for ‘Testament’ she has much more to work with here and is infinitely better.

Ultimately the film shows that you just can’t trust women even when they’re robots and perhaps that men can be persuaded by anything, if it’s attractive enough.

Testament Of Youth

Testament of Youth is considered to be one of the greatest war memoirs ever written, telling Vera Brittain's own story of the First World War from the viewpoint of those not actually on the front line.

The film opens pre-war, Brittain (Alicia Vikander) is living in Buxton Derbyshire from where she watches her brother Edward (Taron Egerton) and his friends Victor (Colin Morgan) and Geoffrey (Jonathan Bailey) getting ready to head off into the world to better themselves. Convention dictates that she will not follow them but will instead get married and raise a family. Given that particular career path investing in her future would be a waste, so her father (Dominic West) initially rejects her desire to attend Oxford University. 

Then when he is persuaded to relent and she passes the entrance examination, the outbreak of war means she will go there alone. By now she is courting her brother’s close friend Roland (Kit Harington) but Roland will not be joining her at Oxford because he is heading off to war along with the others.

Unable to focus on her studies at Oxford, Vera abandons her hard-earned place to sign up to be a nurse where she tends to the wounded and dying of both sides.

Sadly for the film, it is only at this point that the story develops any bite. Until now, it's all been rather unadventurous and frankly quite dull when such a tale should have been at least inspiring. Never does anyone seem to develop much passion for anything, least of all Vera herself and especially not for her passionless heavily chaperoned romance with Roland. If not inspiring it could at least have been harrowing but by the time we finally move to the trenches for a bit of much missed muck and blood it’s all far too late. Even when the bodies of friends and family start to stack up it often feels like it's no big deal.

Even one possible great scene with Vera speaking German to a dying soldier who had previously been shooting at her own side comes over as overly tame.

The whole film is all rather too much like a Sunday evening costume drama on the BBC, so I guess it was no surprise to see the BBC’s name on the opening titles. An opportunity missed.