Christopher Nolan
Dunkirk

Speaking of the director in question, the best thing to do before deciding to sit in the theater is to ignore him. Better; the damn hype buzzing around the web has been making heads spin, as well as being a pain in the ass, for months before Nolan presents a new work of his. So forget him!

Here we are talking about Dynamo, and as far as I'm concerned, a film that comes out in 2017 about such an event and conceived by professionals of such a level (but the consideration of the author stops here!) is automatically worth watching.

What do we find after two hours? A perfect mechanism, a gear of climax and anticlimax calculated to the millimeter, a triple red thread punctuated by the metronome that joins at the right moment into an immense Gordian knot like the hull of a sinking ship.

I'm not going to talk about the music (the keyboard theme that accompanies the various successive catharses is superb, but watch out, musical self-citation is a bad sign…) and the ingenious sound design, the fabulous and granite authenticity of the metal and wooden ships and aircraft, the sumptuous and warm perfection of the uniforms. I will talk about the creaks, which are not only those of the Spitfires on the hunt, but of an entire film that, after half an hour, you realize runs perfectly but to no purpose.

The authors seem to have forgotten that it is about history, about war, and it is precisely here that the (perfect) strategy of tension shows its limits. War is anxiety, uncertainty, fear, but it is also horror, blood & shit, bloated bodies stinking on the beach. Dunkirk was hell, a relentless pounding, a gray defeat that served the redemption of an entire nation. Here there is no blood, there is no chaos, there is only the sequence of bombs and shipwrecks, the resignation of scattered characters who accept events with the stolidity of a mule. In the impeccable and sumptuous technical design lies the major flaw of Dunkirk.

Everything is perfect, but the tracers fired by Tom Hardy water the Emils and the HE111s with infuriating ease; enemy planes, probably with the worst pilots of the Luftwaffe on board, gracefully but absurdly dive into the sea. The fire burns with circumscribed violence, the bombs hole the pier with precision and almost tender patterns, the explosions raise sprays of water and smoke that appear almost ridiculous, the ships rotate diligently as they sink, dragging khaki-colored rats with them. But there is practically no war. The film as a whole paradoxically seems static, which is bizarre considering that Dynamo, which may have been one of His Majesty's army's most epic undertakings, already carries a very different idea in its name.

Nolan likely chose Dunkirk because it concentrates, right between land, sea, and air, the indomitable energy of the soldiers of the old Empire, that spirit of revenge and pride that, from Balaklava to Rorke's Drift to the Battle of Britain, snakes as a myth through English imagination, military but not only. And it is precisely this leitmotif that accompanies the film, from the tagline to the very reasons that drive the very few officers present to act. The director wants to immerse himself in this reality and in the very spirit of the details, but to do this, the broad breath of the historical event is reduced to a few breaths of air.

Perhaps, having an almost maniacal passion for the realities and historical context of major events, I particularly resent this type of approach and maybe the film's strength lies precisely in this subversion of the very idea of war cinema, but in the end, I am not here to tell you what to think, but to tell you what I got from it after the aforementioned two hours.

I believe that Dunkirk will remain impressed for how it is shot, conceived, experienced, for how it vibrates and gasps. CGI practically zero, props and miniatures never so effective (and this for me is sublime). But I also believe that it leaves you ultimately perplexed, relieved but unfulfilled. It seems Nolan wanted to stage the spirit of peaks, collapses, and the cathartic breath of ancient tragedy, missing the focus; war is much more, it is much worse, tragedy is not chaos, it is rigidly structured as the film is and as the escape from the French beaches was not at all. Ah yes, the beach is the only French thing, some helmets and an act of cowardice, or rather fear of dying, stuck with spit; already this is more than enough to make many wrinkle their noses. And yet some scenes could have been carefully omitted: in this sense, the venture and fate of the aforementioned Tom Hardy sound almost like a long and pathetic raspberry.

That said, beauty emerges aggressively from the shots. The beach, the brown waves streaked like marble, the sun setting, shining, and rising on a Channel never so grand, the green and the gray, the leaden clouds hiding the awkward bodies of the motionless ships. Nolan is neither overrated nor lucky, he is simply brilliant at his craft.

This came to mind just after returning from the screening.

But perhaps in a few hours, I will realize that Nolan is much more cunning, and that the United Kingdom, leaving Europe with its tail between its legs, really couldn't care less about the white chalk cliffs, nor does it even have the consolation of having a Churchill at home to tell it where the hell to turn. I say perhaps, eh.