an Oscar Wilde retrospective: the (un)Happy Prince

In a cheap Parisian hotel room Oscar Wilde (Rupert Everett) lies on his death bed. The film The Happy Prince chronicles Wilde’s destitute final years in France as a tangle of memory streams, boozy vignettes and flashbacks within flashbacks. As the audience, I am drawn to observe Wilde's failures with ironic distance, detachment and dark humour. The film opens with Wilde in 1897 leaving a British prison after serving two years for gross indecency. There is an early flashback to him telling stories as he put his two sons to bed. The somewhat autobiographical story of the happy prince, a gilded statue who allows a swallow to denude him of all his gold to feed the poor permeated the movie. We then watch him wander, exiled and frequently penniless, through Dieppe and Naples before expiring of meningitis in Paris 3 years later. Contrasting flashbacks from the humiliation of his trial to the opening-night adulation underline the tragedy of his fall. We also experience the unrequited love triangle between Wilde, the beautiful and manipulative Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas (Colin Morgan) and Wilde’s devoted literary executor Robbie Ross (Edwin Thomas). It seemed that Bosie left Wilde for younger and beautiful lovers, while Wilde played the unrepentant hedonist with the dutiful and loyal Robbie. Wilde treats his loyal allies with ungrateful negligence. While he maintains his male friendships with Robbie and Reggie Turner (Colin Firth), he cannot reconcile with his wife Constance (Emily Watson) and loses her financial support. He does however befriend a young Paris rent boy and his tough kid brother and holds them spellbound with his fairy-tale of the happy prince. It is the closest Wilde comes to any form of personal redemption, where he realises that love is the only thing worth worshipping. To complement this sad and melancholic content, the film is filmed in dark and seedy alleyways, pubs and faded restaurants. The constant horror of humiliation and poverty is at odds with the characters' indulgent search for luxury. So perhaps after all, there is a higher order explanation where polite society was prepared to turn a blind eye to homosexual affairs with the lower orders, who could be bought and bought off. It seems that Wilde's flaunted connection with the Queensberry family was a class transgression and his fatal flaw. So as a tragic genius, he lived and died for love.

Inspired and entertained by Woman at War

I was attracted by an Icelandic film with a female lead more than the actual title: Woman at War. I was pleasantly surprised as the war was a subtle environmental one and the woman, Halla (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir) was a smart and talented fifty-year-old. The Icelandic scenery and the haunting music played by musicians across the country was also a pleasant surprise. Wherever she was, there was a trio nearby of poker-faced musicians. This film was spectacular at every level. It was an intelligent feel-good film that addressed real and urgent global issues with humour, music and a satisfying sense of justice. Behind the scenes of her regular routine as a choir director, Halla led a double life as a passionate environmental activist, known as the Woman of the Mountain. In the opening scene we see her firing a bow and arrow across high power lines to cut power to the local aluminium smelter and protest against the energy corporations that are moving into Iceland. There are some wonderful cat and mouse scenes on wild moors where she hides from the helicopter under a mossy overhang. As she seeks help from local sheep farmers, we see their support for the environment. There is also a comic counterpoint, played by a wandering Spanish tourist named Juan (Juan Camilla Roman Estrada) who keeps cycling in the wrong place and is mistakenly identified for Halla’s crimes. She continues her dramatic industrial sabotage with help from a Government insider but as American thermal cameras monitor Iceland's highlands from space, Halla is trying to decide if she should stop using her bow and arrow and issue the ecological manifesto she’s been planning. A surprise phone call reveals that an application Halla made years earlier to adopt a child has unexpectedly been accepted. A sprightly Ukrainian girl orphaned by war needs a mother. So Halla's challenge is whether she can risk being imprisoned when she’s responsible for a child already traumatized by the loss of one home. At the same time, a cappella trio of women in traditional Ukrainian folk dress sing up a storm at key decision-making points. With perfect timing, Halla’s twin, Asa, shows up although she has just agreed to join an ashram in India for two years. This sets the scene for a few interesting twists and turns. The final scenes offer a heart-warming resolution, but the environment wins out, in a lingering warning.

wet weekend escapism in The Aftermath

A Ridley Scott period drama set in Germany seemed like a cathartic wet weekend escape. Emotional scenes at opposite platforms of Hamburg's main station, several months apart begin and close this dramatic film. In 1946, Rachael Morgan (Keira Knightley) arrived to the snow-covered ruins of Hamburg to be reunited with her British General husband Lewis (Jason Clarke). While he was duty bound to rebuild the occupied city, she was grieving her son, recently killed in a London bombing raid. Despite a well manicured retro wardrobe, Keira's girlish pouting reinforced naïve ignorance while emphasising her romantic and unrealistic expectations of 'dedicated' time with her almost estranged husband. Lewis moved Rachel into a mansion on the North Sea that was recently confiscated by the British government from its former tenants, Stephen Lubert (Alexander Skarsgård) and his teenage daughter, Freda (Flora Thiemann). While Lewis cannot show compassion for his lost son, he does allow Stephan and Freda to live upstairs in their own house, rather than sending them to the POW camps. When we realise that Stephan has just lost his wife in the final bombing raid on Hamburg, the scene is set for the inevitable drama triangle. The plot builds on the precarious living arrangement between strangers and former enemies connected by their respective losses and unresolved grief. The quick escalation to the ultimate betrayal is somewhat forced, but the later twists are not as predictable and prompt thoughtful reflection. This film portrays a challenging historical epoch that has not been addressed in many films; the painful process of establishing peace between recent enemies amidst the daily devastation. Behind this, there is also the cultural 'hatred' between the triumphant British occupiers and the German who were losing their homeland. The young and naïve British army were bumbling and arrogant in their attempts to wipe out Nazi sympathisers while occupying homes of previously successful and educated Germans. The process of building peace was not well explored given that the German younger generations are still coming to terms with the complexity of their grandparents' lives. Neither Nazism or resistance was simply good or bad, and most individuals were living with complex personal and political losses.