Colette (2018)

Keira Knightley stars in this biopic about the novelist Colette, directed by Wash Westmoreland. 

After growing up in rural 19th-century, France, Colette meets and marries Willie (Dominic West), a Paris-based literary entrepreneur who uses ghostwriters to come up with articles in his name. When Colette reveals a talent for writing, she embarks on a series of novels that Willy takes the credit for. 

It’s an intriguing drama that evokes the time and place well. Knightley gives one of the strongest and most multifaceted performances of her career. West is also good as her thoroughly unlikeable husband. The focus on the balance of power in their relationship is expertly handled.

I wanted to find out more about what happened to Collette’s life and writing, but it’s left to the brief snippets of on-screen text at the end to fill you in.

Never Let Me Go (2010)

Based on Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, this is possibly the most depressing film I’ve ever seen. 

1978. Three young friends, Kathy, Tommy and Ruth, are at a mysterious boarding school called Hailsham. One day, a teacher tells them that they only exist to be organ donors. They will “complete” (i.e., die) in early adulthood when they are no longer strong enough to donate further organs. The film is split between their childhood at Hailsham and their adulthood – in 1985, and then in 1994 – once the donor process begins. Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield star. 

What makes it work is that the plot functions as a romantic love triangle, but it’s set against an extremely subtle dystopian backdrop. There’s a lot that isn’t explained – such as why they barely seem to resist or even question their destiny. Is that because of brainwashing or did the film just avoid the most obvious issues? As it stands, their resigned behaviour just adds to the sense of grim fatalism, which is probably intentional. 

The bleakness comes from the way it’s shot as well as the overall message. It leaves you almost no glimmer of hope. In its own it's way quite brilliant, but ultimately I regretted watching it.

Everest (2015)

Disaster/survival film about the true-life events of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster involving two climbing groups, led by Rob Hall (Jason Clarke) and Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal). Everything turns nasty when a storm blows in and the mountaineers find themselves badly underprepared. 

It’s an extremely tense drama that’s all the more affecting because these events actually happened. 

Josh Brolin plays Beck Weathers, who survives but loses his hands and nose to frostbite. Robin Wright plays his wife back home, hoping to coordinate a helicopter rescue attempt. 

Keira Knightley plays Rob Hall’s wife and does the “terrified spouse stuck at home” part better than most, probably because the role is fully developed and she’s given a character to explore. 

Also excellent is Emily Watson as Helen Wilton, the base camp manager. Her experience of the escalating horror conveys just what it must have been like to witness this nightmare and be powerless to stop it. 

The film doesn’t moralise or pass judgement on why the deaths occurred. Instead, it pieces together a narrative that lets you make up your own mind.

Bend It Like Beckham (2012)

Comedy drama. 

Jesminder “Jess” Bhamra (Parminder Nagra) is a football enthusiast with a special talent for the game, but her parents don’t approve and want her to follow a traditional Sikh path in life. When Jess meets Jules (Keira Knightley) and team coach Joe (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) she realises that football might be her future after all. 

There’s lots to love about this film. The three leads are all excellent and deliver refreshing, emotive performances. What lets it down is the awkward presentation of the older generation. There’s an excruciatingly hammy performance by Juliet Stevenson as Jules’ mother. She’s embarrassing to watch and I never once believed they were related. Her father (Frank Harper) is almost as bad. In fact, all four of the girls’ parents are represented as one-dimensional “types”. There’s a woeful lack of subtlety and nuance in the characterisation. Much better is Archie Panjabi as Jess’s older sister, who is planning to marry. The dynamic between the two girls is tender and has the all-important ring of truth about it. 

The music sometimes seems misjudged, used in fast-cut, intrusive “pop video” sequences that undermine the drama. It could have been grittier and tighter (like Brassed Off, perhaps), but parts of it feel like an episode of Grange Hill. 

That said, it ultimately wins you over with a rousing, feel-good finale, and the simple charm of the two footballing friends is sweet and touching.

Atonement (2007)

Adaptation of Ian McEwan’s popular Booker-shortlisted novel. 

England, 1935. A precocious girl named Briony blames her sister’s lover (the housekeeper’s son) for a crime he didn’t commit. This simple act of immature cruelty has vast implications for the rest of their lives.

Briony is played by three actors – at the ages of 13 (Saoirse Ronan), 18 (Romola Garai) and as an elderly lady (Vanessa Redgrave). Keira Knightley plays her wronged sister and James McAvoy plays Knightley’s lover, sent first to prison and then off to war. Benedict Cummerbatch and Brenda Blethyn also feature. I’m not especially keen on the aesthetic, but the soundtrack – with rhythms built around the pounding of a typewriter – perfectly suits the mood and builds tension when needed. 

A lengthy, unedited shot showing the soldiers on the beaches at Dunkirk is incredibly panoramic and impressive.

The film cleverly jumps around in time and perspective, but the storytelling is so lucid that this never becomes tricksy or confusing. It tackles issues of class and social inequality, along with deeper questions about morality. It’s to the credit of McEwan and director Joe Wright that no easy answers are given and religion doesn’t even get a look in. There’s no easy “forgiveness” to be had here. The bleaker message is that you can spend a lifetime atoning for a moment’s misjudgement and never erase the damage you have done.

Love Actually (2003)

Comedy-drama written and directed by Richard Curtis. Utilising an all-star cast, it weaves together several narrative threads with a common theme of love set in the days leading up to Christmas. Some of them work better than others, but the problem with having so many stories running in parallel is that they all get merely superficial treatment. 

I would have liked more detail on the plots involving Colin Firth/Lúcia Moniz (couple fall in love but speak different languages), Hugh Grant/Martine McCutcheon (Prime Minister falls for junior member of staff) and Alan Rickman/Emma Thompson (married managing director is tempted by his secretary). The Bill Nighy story (past-his-prime rocker attempts comeback) is silly but occasionally amusing. However, the threads concerning Keira Knightley (new husband’s best friend is in love with her), Martin Freeman (acts in nude scenes with a girl but becomes paradoxically shy when asking her out) and Kris Marshall (goes to America to find a female who’ll sleep with him) could all have been ditched entirely to let the other parts breathe a little. 

The worst segments involve Liam Neeson’s precocious stepchild – a horribly self-conscious little know-all played by Thomas Sangster. This child is apparently unruffled by the recent death of his mother, but lectures his stepdad on the nature of relationships. There’s also a daft airport scene in which his antics would have probably got him shot by anti-terrorist security guards. 

It was also baffling that the same song (“Love Is All Around”) had to be revived from an earlier Richard Curtis film: Four Weddings and a Funeral. Maybe it was a self-referential joke, but couldn't they just have come up with another love song? There’s no shortage. 

I admire the ambition, and there were some genuinely funny moments, but it ended up being a sprawling mess. Woody Allen could have done much more with the raw material and handled the complex storytelling with greater skill.

Anna Karenina (2012)

When I first saw this lavish Joe Wright/Tom Stoppard adaptation of the Tolstoy novel, at the cinema in 2012, I wasn’t sure what to make of it at all. The radical decision to stage many of the scenes in a theatre set means that you never know quite what to believe – is the action really taking place or is it a stylised manifestation of a character’s feelings? On second viewing, I began to see it as a masterpiece that deliberately pulls apart the “reality” it constructs – perhaps to suggest that everything we do is a sort of fiction. It has a lot of fun with this – for example, switching from footage of a real train to a toy train and seeming to delight in the fact that it’s obviously a miniature model. In another scene, a letter is torn up and thrown into the air. The pieces keep falling because they have become snowflakes. Sometimes a door or window on the stage opens to another place entirely. There’s a sort of Escher logic to it, and you wonder how on Earth they planned it all so cleverly.  

The danger is that such a stylised approach might limit the film’s emotional impact, but if anything it works the other way, elevating simple scenes into works of art that magnify the characters’ situations. It would presumably have been so much easier to make the film as a standard costumer, but instead it operates on a higher level. 

Keira Knightley is appealing and convincing in the title role. Jude Law looks nothing like himself as her rigidly controlling husband. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the dangerous, icily charming Count Vronsky, who Anna has a devastating affair with. The love story is expertly told. There’s a parallel tale of what happens when passion and freedom conflict with social conformity. Should you follow your heart or do what’s expected of you by your peers and your class? For Anna, of course, neither option works out well.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)

This was critically savaged and/or ignored at the time of release. In his one-star Guardian review, Peter Bradshaw wrote: “You will have had handfuls of wet sand in your swimsuit less irritating than this supremely irritating romantic dramedy.” But I liked the title and the concept – in three weeks the Earth will be destroyed by an asteroid. As society breaks down, everyone has to address the question of how they use the time they have left.

Penny (Keira Knightley) and Dodge (Steve Carell) are neighbours in the same apartment block. When looting and rioting hits their street, they take off together on what turns out to be a sort of road trip. They are opposites in many ways – she’s English, he’s American; she’s 28, he’s middle-aged; she’s giddily naive, he’s reliable, worldly and wise – but inevitably they begin to fall for each other as their time runs out. The blossoming love story points at bigger questions: what really matters in these extreme circumstances? Why does it matter? Who should you spend your last few hours with? Friends and family? A lover? Or a random stranger in the new climate of anything-goes lawlessness?

I can see why Peter Bradshaw was irritated, but I think Keira Knightley’s scatty, free-spirited persona is deliberately annoying. She needs to be, initially, because the film is partly about her character’s progression to maturity as she finally meets someone she really cares about.

One thing fails to ring true, though. She’s supposed to be a music fan and she saves a selection of records from her apartment during the riot. (There are prominent displays of LPs by Herb Alpert, John Cale, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed and Scott Walker at various points in the film.) But there’s something oddly unconvincing about K.K. as a record buyer, even given the faddishness of vinyl in younger consumers. She even self-consciously says: “I love records. You really have to take care of vinyl.”

It’s not a masterpiece – it could certainly have been funnier, and some of the scenes could have worked better – but it seems more relevant than ever during these dark times of a global pandemic. And despite the unevenness, I was both moved and amused.

Edge of Love (2008)

Fairly compelling drama set during World War II. When young Welsh singer Vera (Keira Knightley) meets her old friend Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys), their youthful attraction is rekindled. But Thomas is now married to Caitlin (Sienna Miller), and Vera is courted by a soldier (Cillian Murphy) soon to be sent back into battle.

The film wisely keeps its focus on the relationship between the two women, the real subject of the story, with the famous poet creating both a bond and a tension between them. Unlike Sylvia and Iris, it’s certainly not a writer biopic.

Knightley’s Welsh accent is surprisingly convincing, although people from Wales might not agree. Her singing is credible, too. She’s charismatic, as is Murphy as her troubled lover, psychologically damaged by the war. Sienna Miller is also impressive, communicating a huge range of emotions with subtle grace. Rhys, meanwhile, struggles somewhat to convey the magnetism that the plot needs to hinge upon. Poetry aside, exactly what was it that these two women loved so much about him?

The film is occasionally a little over-stylised and there are some unrealistic moments (a view of St. Paul’s Cathedral amid bomb wreckage just looked like a painting), but it’s never predictable and it makes you fully engage with all four of the main characters. In terms of mood and tone it flits oddly all over the place, but I rather like that.

There are cameos by Suggs of Madness and Lisa Stansfield.

Keira Knightley’s mother wrote the screenplay.

An incredible number of cigarettes are smoked.

It’s not clear why it’s called Edge of Love – a title that would work for almost any film with a romantic storyline.