It has become a regular occurrence at film festivals to see two episodes of prestige television. It is a little disconcerting to stop watching the series when two-fifths of the time has passed, but for those who wonder whether this dilutes or betrays the great cause of the big screen, well, it was enough for David Lynch. Justin Kurzel's film The Narrow Road to the Deep North has arrived in Berlin, a big, bold and complicatedly sensual epic about wartime angst and reckoning, adapted by screenwriter Shaun Grant from Richard Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning bestseller.
The story unfolds in three phases: before, during and after the Second World War. Jacob Elordi is Dorrigo Evans, an Australian medical student about to ship out, engaged to a beautiful woman from a wealthy family, but having a passionate affair with Amy (Odessa Young), the younger second wife of his uncle Keith (Simon Baker).
Stars: Jacob Elordi, Odessa Young, Masa Yamaguchi
During the war, Dorrigo is captured by the Japanese and forced to work on the Burma Railway, beaten, brutalised and tortured like everyone else. After the war, now an old man in 1989, Dorrigo is played by Ciarán Hinds; he has become a celebrated surgeon living in a beautiful modernist house and a spokesman for his generation of ex-servicemen. He is shown exploding with rage at a young journalist who suggests that what the Japanese suffered at Hiroshima and Nagasaki far outweighs what they did to Allied prisoners of war on the Burma Railway.
What is interesting here is not that all the drama (of Dorrigo's relationship with Amy, of the war itself) happened in the past, while the present is a matter of bittersweet memories and a peacefully married Dorrigo not speaking to his wife Ella (Heather Mitchell) about a life of lies and guilt. No: dramatic and transgressive things are happening right now. Dorrigo, now older, is having a passionate affair with Lynette (Essie Davis), the wife of a fellow surgeon, and who's to say that that relationship isn't as significant as the one that transfigures the wartime past? Perhaps what the war has taught Dorrigo is to seize moments of sensual pleasure when you can.
The drama indirectly reveals mysteries that underpin the events: Dorrigo's thoughtless Uncle Keith (a modestly good performance by Simon Baker) seems very relaxed about letting his nephew spend quality time with the young second wife he took shortly after the death of his first. Is it because he feels guilty himself? That he senses that Amy is dissatisfied and willing to turn a blind eye to a connection with the nephew she thinks might well die in the war? And what are Dorrigo's feelings about that or anything else? Both Elordi’s younger Dorrigo and Hinds’ older Dorrigo are opaque, as the older man irritably explains to the young journalist: feelings were not as fashionable in the 40s as they are now. And perhaps feelings were what were burnt out by the violence of war.
Any drama with this subject matter and these scenes – the brutality of the labour camps, the terrible shock of prisoners of war taking pride in the forced labour they perform, the parades of emaciated men, the clashes between Western and Japanese officers – inevitably brings back memories of a classic like David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (even the title of this film has, I suspect, a small echo). Perhaps the key horrifying sequence is the hint of friendship between Dorrigo and the relatively amiable Major Nakamura (Shô Kasamatsu), who then tactlessly reveals to his commanding officer, Colonel Kota (Taki Abe), that he has been almost fraternising with him. Kota coldly asks the Major if he has ever beheaded a man, an experience he says should be a rite of passage for a Japanese warrior. He orders a shivering Australian prisoner to kneel in front of him, the increasingly restless Major, and the rest of the prisoners – just to demonstrate the sword stance, just a theoretical test, he assures them all.
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