Synopsis
Set in South Wales during 1944-45, it shows what life might have been like had the D Day invasions failed and the Germans had invaded Britain. A group of soldiers come upon a village and lodge there. The Welshmen have all gone off to fight and the women reluctantly accept the soldier’s help in farming. A relationship develops between a farmer’s wife Sarah played by Andrea Riseborough and a German captain. Tommy Atkins, Michael Sheen’s character, warns a lad who stays behind that collaborators should be shot. This lad shoots at one of the women on her way back from a horse fair, he accidentally shoots the horse. Sheen turns up…… due to events that follow the Gestapo will be involved here. Riseborough leaves and the Captain stays to face the Gestapo.
Criticism
A fascinating if rather slow moving look at alternative history. It’s all very austere like another film set in Welsh sheep farming country, Sleep Furiously, but with guns. We see German soldiers execute captured fighters and there are swastikas at the horse fair, which is like a graphic novel novel touch. Alternative history can come perilously close to slapstick, perhaps because we have such a weight of hindsight which we call ‘history’, that any alternative looks like an imposter from a fantasy.
Andrea Riseborough, with her wan pre-Raphaelite gaze, is like a long suffering martyr of lost love and weary patience. We know she will soften her attitude to the German captain, if she didn’t there wouldn’t be any dramatic development and of course the film requires that. The film tries to show what it would be like to be occupied. How would we have managed? Would we have had the courage and strength to be in the resistance? What about the constant terror of pain if the Gestapo catch you? Because we did not face that existential ordeal we have the luxury of vicarious attitudinizing, reducing it to a sort of drama class in moral choices. Before he joins the men in the hills, Michael Sheen advises a stay behind lad that we are made by our choices, but Sartre would say the same in Existentialism is a Humanism at this time. The lad does make a choice and it involves deadly consequences. The film skilfully tautens the terror of the Gestapo threat and this trumps the temptation to lapse into complacent resignation, so it keeps you on edge, though I could have done with fewer shots of noble profiles gazing into the mists.
The German soldiers here are not the automatons of the average war film, nor the gross caricatures that convinced gullible TV audiences that ‘Allo ‘Allo was actually funny. Just as I thought we were getting the usual ‘Good German’ routine, the Captaln shows his toughness by being brutish to Sheen. In war films we have been used to the ‘ordinary German soldier is a good German’ stereotype, it makes you wonder how Hitler managed to gather enough soldiers to invade Poland! Hitler had millions of accomplices.
There are some vivid cameos, especially the Mappa Mundi hidden in a cave. Welsh hill farming is closely observed. Running through all this is the boundary between collaboration and getting by, what can actually be construed as collaboration? The film negotiates this problem well, as it shows the arbitrariness in the notion of collaboration when we see it justifying needless cruelty as when the lad tries to shoot the Welsh farm woman.
A fascinating look at what might have been.
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