dunkirk (w&d nolan)

We went to watch Dunkirk in a cinema on Ejido, which was nearly full. People here don’t know much about the Second World War; the film has no major stars; but the grinding wheels of the publicity machine had worked and Montevideans had come out in force to see Nolan’s curious change of direction. Dunkirk is a visceral film. If the ending of Inception is one long action sequence which somewhat undermines the (relative) subtlety of that which has gone before, this film announces itself from the very first as an action picture, designed to bludgeon the spectator into submission. It’s loud. It’s in your face. It’s heart is more interested in the sound of its own beat than reaching out to find another. 

On some levels, at the time, it succeeded. For example: my grandfather was a fighter pilot who was shot down, so the story goes. On the Eastern Front, fighting for the Luftwaffe, but all the same, his fate had much in common with Tom Hardy’s journey through the sky to the coast of France. Or, at least I can imagine that it did. I don’t know how many war films I’ve watched in my life, but none has made me associate so readily with his, my grandfather’s, fate. Again, it was the sheer viscerality of the film which achieved this. It didn’t give me time to reflect. The connection occurred and it stuck. Not that I particularly cared what happened to Hardy’s character. Or any of the characters, come to that. They were figures on a battlefield, statistics. Any attempt to personalise these figures felt half-hearted. The sentimental twist of the boy who died getting his moment of glory in the local paper seemed tacked-on. As, indeed, did the whole last 10 minutes, as the troops returned home. Because it’s fairly clear that Nolan isn’t interested in the history; he’s interested in the dynamics and the logistics. He wants you to have some idea of how it feels to be stuck on a beach knowing that the sands of time are running out. The short-termism of war, the way you live for the next ten minutes, or hour, or, at most, day. In which regard, of all his films, this one has more in common with Memento than any other. 

Which is also how it ties into his wider oeuvre. Above all, Nolan is interested in time. What it means to live within edited time, when the value of a second, a minute, an hour, becomes radically heightened. Cinema narrative is about all kinds of things, love, peace, war, betrayal, you name it. But it is always, no matter what, about time. Nolan relishes this. The great attraction for the filmmaker of Dunkirk wasn’t that it was a valiant moment in British history. It was that there was a fixed time permitted to get the troops off the beach. The enemy wasn’t just the Nazis. It was time.