reviews

How the ‘We Live In Time’ team got an original British romance into cinemas

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Directed by John Crowley, We Live In Time presents a love story where time is in short supply

By Charles Gant

When SunnyMarch commissioned playwright and screenwriter Nick Payne to adapt a book they had in development with Studio­canal, the UK production company might have been fazed by the creative pivot he eventually proposed. “He turned around one day and said, ‘Can I do something else? I’ve got a better idea, and I really, really want to do it.’”

SunnyMarch head of film Leah Clarke is relating the course of events that led to the creation of contemporary British romantic drama We Live In Time, scripted by Payne, directed by John Crowley (Brooklyn), produced by SunnyMarch in association with Shoebox, and starring Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh.

“We were delighted at the idea of Nick doing an original for us, especially something that was romantic and meaningful,” adds Clarke. SunnyMarch took the proposal back to Studiocanal, “and they were very gracious, and were up for it”.

That smooth course of events might seem surprising, given the current focus on adapting existing source material or biographical/historical subjects for the screen – which in Studiocanal’s case include recent hits Back To Black, Wicked Little Letters and The Outrun. And Clarke agrees it was hard to pitch comp titles for the film to Studio­canal and fellow backers A24 (which has North American rights) and Film4. She mentions Silver Linings Playbook and Blue Valentine.

“But those films are American, and that kind of indie [original romantic drama] space doesn’t really exist here [in the UK]. So the only way it was going to get made is if it had two big stars who had terrific chemistry.”

SunnyMarch’s next step was to attach a director, and it reached out to Crowley, director of Payne’s play The Same Deep Water As Me at the Donmar Warehouse in 2013. Payne is best known for play Constellations, which was first produced at the Royal Court Theatre in 2012 and offers a playful perspective on love while stirring in fizzy ideas about science and cosmology as well as a story­line involving terminal illness and assisted dying.

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Robert Wyatt “Maryan”

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One of Robert’s great, subtle, riverine songs

By Rino Breebaart

There is a special, resonant magic that happens when a song’s lyrics and melody mingle and merge. Take the gently meandering poetry of “Maryan” off [Robert Wyatt’s] Shleep album. The lyrics unroll and bend with the melody like a river unrolling to its delta. There’s a tonal consistency to the song, a timelessness like a drone with downstream force ― addressing only its own flow (cue Wagner’s Rheingold prelude). It’s a beguilingly complex-as-simple song structure that comprises a long melodic verse, and some equally long instrumentals over basic but unexpected chord changes. There is no chorus, and then the verse is repeated ― the last word ‘Maryan’ stretching and rising in extended harmony. But it’s one of the longest verse-melodies in the business ― I think only Prince’s “7” comes close in duration ― and there too a distinct chorus is lacking, unnecessary. The lyrics and words pitch and bend to conform with the colourful melody just as the sound and vibe of the song remain harmonious with the natural setting. 

Over an ocean away,
Like salmon…

Actually, the salmon isn’t going downstream but back to the icy source of the river. Which is a woman. It’s a lovely dream-like tension of thematic undercurrent and execution. Unhurried, layered with trumpet and violin, harmonious like a small ecosystem of song. Circle of life stuff. Vaguely Joycean. And perfectly tuned to the subconscious themes of Shleep. Inspiration and return to nature via art.

A note should be made of the great run of Wyatt albums beginning with Shleep: Wyatt is singular in a way that’s difficult to transcribe ― he’s one of the most musical songwriters in a way that takes from free jazz and prog and pop, and yet he makes completely satisfying albums (in the old school sense) that are as intelligent as they’re artistic. He has more genius than tradition. He is an internationalist, a player in all styles living in Britain; wholly self-made and maturing on an ongoing basis. I’m tempted to call him the Dylan of Britain as there are touches of the 60s experimentalist about Wyatt, and I wanted to parallel his run of albums with Dylan’s late explosion from Time Out of Mind on ― but by revealing contrast, Dylan’s recent run is a devolution to genre whereas Wyatt’s is a true extension of the craft ― stretching and trialling free experiments of melody and form. His a wonderfully active musical brain. A song scientist using moody, disconcerting chords, gnomic impressionism, bemused wit and tender dilation as his alchemic tools. Singular and yet containing multitudes, as they say.

Source: The Slow Review

10 Great British Christmas films

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Highlights from more than 125 years of homegrown Christmas movies, from Cash on Demand to Brazil.

By David Parkinson

British filmmakers have been producing Christmas pictures for more than 125 years, dating back to G.A. Smith’s Santa Claus in 1898. In 1901 came R.W. Paul’s Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost (1901), the first of over 400 worldwide screen adaptations of A Christmas Carol, starring Daniel Smith as Charles Dickens’s miser. Sadly, only a three-minute fragment of this survives, but the spooky superimpositions set a trend for festive chillers that has continued with titles as varied as The Legend of Hell House (1973), Don’t Open till Christmas (1984) and Wind Chill (2007).

There are Yuletide vignettes in the classic horror anthologies Dead of Night (1945) and Tales from the Crypt (1972), while Terence Davies created memorably unsettling Christmas scenes in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992). Indeed, a number of significant British features have included festive segments, among them Things to Come (1936), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), Morvern Callar (2002) and All of Us Strangers (2023).

Others have holiday settings that aren’t central to the action, such as The Lion in Winter (1968), Twelfth Night (1996) and The Eternal Daughter (2022). Social realist outings like Hector (2015) are relatively scarce, but there are countless cosy romcoms, including Love Actually (2003), which is currently on the naughty list, along with the sad but seedy sexploitation saga Escort Girls (1974). For causing seasonal offence, however, nothing can top Ken Russell’s final short, A Kitten for Hitler (2007).

This year, Richard Curtis’s That Christmas is hoping to become an animated favourite to rank alongside the likes of The Candlemaker (1957), The Snowman (1982) and Arthur Christmas (2011). Do seek out Nadolig Plentyn Yng Nghymru (2008), a Welsh-language version of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. But we also hope you find something here to brighten your holiday.

Scrooge (1951)

Director: Brian Desmond Hurst

Scrooge (1951)

There have been various excellent screen manifestations of Charles Dickens’s story about a miser who becomes the embodiment of Christmas spirit after three spectral visitations. Starring Seymour Hicks, the 1935 film Scrooge broke the mold by having a female ghost, played by Marie Ney. But it’s Brian Desmond Hurst’s 1951 version that has become the classic, and that’s largely due to the performance of Alistair Sim, whose bereftness at the loss of his beloved sister sets him on the path to callous avarice, albeit abetted by Mr Jorkin, a character who was invented by screenwriter Noel Langley, who also boosted the part of cleaning-woman Mrs Dilber for Kathleen Harrison.

Built at Nettlefold Studios, the sets capture the chasm between the classes, as do the character-defining costumes. The double-exposed hauntings may not inspire dread, although the influence of expressionism is evident in C.M. Pennington-Richards’ cinematography. But this is Sim’s show, and he revisited Ebenezer in the Oscar-winning 1971 animation, A Christmas Carol.

The Holly and the Ivy (1952)

Director: George More O’Ferrall

The Holly and the Ivy (1952)

In this Chekhovian chamber drama, based on a 1950 West End hit by playwright Wynyard Browne derived from his own experiences, the children of a Norfolk parson gather at a snowy vicarage for Christmas. Fashionista Margaret (Margaret Leighton) and soldier Michael (Denholm Elliott) are reluctant visitors to Wyndenham, as they have lost their faith and grown apart from sister Jenny (Celia Johnson), who has rejected the marriage proposal of a local engineer (John Gregson) to care for their father. However, the Reverend Martin Gregory (Ralph Richardson) isn’t the dog-collared martinet they envisage and empathises with problems that anticipate those that would shock sensibilities during Britain’s social-realist new wave.

Indeed, despite the cut-glass accents of a cast who unusually rehearsed on the sets before shooting in sequence, there’s something enduringly relevant about such themes as the breakdown of communication, the anguish of alienation, the demise of deference, and the vagaries of family life.

The Crowded Day (1954)

Director: John Guillermin

The Crowded Day (1954)

Department stores have often cropped up in festive features, but there’s little comfort or joy in this sophisticated soap opera from emerging director John Guillermin. He keeps his camera moving to convey the bustle at Bunting and Hobbs, while also deftly shifting tone to follow the fortunes of five women who work on various counters.

The storyline centring on Yvonne (Josephine Griffin) was considered scandalous for its time, as she discovers she’s pregnant by a man from a wealthy family. Even more shockingly, would-be film star Suzy (Vera Day) is assaulted by a chauffeur posing as a director. Despite reflecting the changing attitudes and aspirations of a country finally emerging from post-war austerity, screenwriter Talbot Rothwell would skirt such realist inclinations in his 20 Carry On films, and he sees the lighter side of the romantic tussle between Joan Rice and John Gregson, who even has a vintage car, as in the previous year’s Genevieve.

On the Twelfth Day… (1955)

Director: Wendy Toye

On the Twelfth Day… (1955)

When it came to feminism, pioneering British filmmaker Wendy Toye reckoned that “doing something and getting on with it and not being a crashing bore about things is probably better than getting on a platform and making some big speech”. She ably proved her point with this delightful satire on courtship rituals, in which she plays Miss Tilly, an Edwardian woman who is bombarded by her earnest ‘true love’ (David O’Brien) with gifts inspired by the song ‘The 12 Days of Christmas’. Chaos ensues, as the set designed by cartoonist Ronald Searle is overrun by what Time magazine called a “pyramiding progression of flora, fauna and assorted humans”.

Toye and Searle had collaborated on the stage play Wild Thyme (1955), and would reunite on the Butter Board-sponsored A.A. Milne adaptation The King’s Breakfast (1963). But it was this Eastmancolour debunking of romance, nostalgia and festive cheer that earned them an Oscar nomination for best live-action short.

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Music Review: The Unthanks “In Winter”

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By Gavin McNamara

Way back in December 2009, BBC4 aired The Christmas Session, a “live” show that featured yuletide favourites from the likes of Bellowhead, Sam Lee, Jim Moray (whose O Come, O Come Emmanuel is the very highest watermark for a folky carol) and Lisa Knapp. It’s a glorious thing. Full of joy and love but reflective and thoughtful too. It is everything that a folk session at Christmas time should be and should, ideally, be watched every Christmas Eve. Right at the centre of it all were The Unthanks, only really a few years into their existence but already a vital part of the folk world.

The only place you’ll hear Bellowhead’s version of The Mistletoe Bough (starts at 16:30); the best and most gristly of the Sheffield carols.

It has taken them the best part of fifteen years but Rachel, Becky, Adrian McNally, Niopha Keegan and Chris Price have finally made the album that they’ve been thinking about since that session. They will say that In Winter is “a winter fantasia”, rather than a straight-up Christmas album, but the same feelings of love and joy, reflection and thoughtfulness are seen across its seventy-minute span. To the surprise of not a single soul, The Unthanks have made the definitive folk album for winter.

This is the sort of winter that you imagine The Unthanks having. Simple, elegant, beautiful and just a tiny but dark around the edges.

In Winter’s Night, a delicate piano piece by McNally, is inspired by, although sounds nothing like, Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols and carries the same chilly air. It starts with a howling wind, insistent and bitter and needing to be shut out, McNally’s piano is the lighting of candles, the laying of a fire, the gentle welcome to join the family as the door is closed. At times it skates away – it is so hard not to hear Vincent Guaraldi’s Charlie Brown theme sometimes – but does so in a playful way. Finally, the door is shut altogether and the family can be gathered properly, to enjoy the splendour of a Christmas tree.

As In Winter is a “fantasia”, each track runs into the next, a whole world is built as one song, one tune, transitions seamlessly into the next. As such, as the door is shut, snow can be heard crunching under-foot, sleigh bells ring and a great whoosh of rolling cymbals herald O Tannenbaum. Where the first track is full of restraint, this is lavish, as dense as evergreen. Oboe and percussion mass around the voices of Rachel and Becky, it is incredibly slick and overwhelmingly Christmassy. McNally might suggest that he doesn’t want to “over-egg” this album but this reworking of O Christmas Tree feels like a party that’s too warm, too stuffed with people. There’s jollity here but it’s not undercut with enough of that Unthanks chilliness.

The same can almost be said for Dark December too. It’s a companion piece to Sad February, from 2009’s Here’s the Tender Coming, and starts more slowly, electric guitar and ice-sheet percussion, a clear, crisp spookiness in the voices. This is the sort of winter that you imagine The Unthanks having. Simple, elegant, beautiful and just a tiny but dark around the edges. More Box of Delights than endless Quality Street. Then Faye MacCalman’s saxophone sweeps in, epic and enormous. There’s something so unusual about it that it takes a while to adjust. It’s like an Easter Egg under the tree.

The Unthanks In Winter. Credit: Topher Grills

MacCalman has played with the band as a clarinettist on their 2017 album Diversions, Vol. 4, The Songs and Poems of Molly Drake, but she is given free rein on Carol of the Beasts. Faint shoegaze echoes, the splash of medieval drums and drones are dashed to the floor as MacCalman unleashes a wild sax volley. If Becky Unthank thinks that the saxophone is “dangerous”, then this one sends the best crockery flying.

It’s a conscious decision to expand The Unthanks’ musical palette, to move things away from the darkness and the drones. McNally feels that the players on the album are of such quality that he didn’t want to, or wasn’t able to, bury the music in a “Cocteau Twins-y wash”. It’s undoubtedly brave, the playing is certainly beautiful, but is it just too much? Does it get too close to being “just” a Christmas album?

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