A double-episode showcase of prestige TV has now become commonplace at film festivals. It’s a bit disconcerting to stop watching two-fifths of the way in, but for those wondering if this dilutes or betrays the great cause of the big screen – well, it was good enough for David Lynch. Justin Kurzel’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North has now come to Berlin, a big, bold, complicatedly sensual epic of wartime anguish and personal reckoning, adapted by screenwriter Shaun Grant from the Booker prize winning bestseller by Richard Flanagan.
The story operates 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 he has a passionate affair with Amy (Odessa Young), the younger second wife of his uncle Keith (Simon Baker).
During the war, he is captured by the Japanese and forced to work on the Burma railway – beaten, brutalised and tortured like all the rest. After the war, as an older man in 1989, Dorrigo is played by Ciarán Hinds; he has become a celebrated surgeon living in a handsome modernist house and a spokesperson 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 more than cancels what they did to Allied PoWs 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 placidly married Dorrigo not talking to his wife Ella (Heather Mitchell) about a lifetime of lies and guilt. No: dramatic and transgressive things are happening right now. Older Dorrigo is having a passionate affair with Lynette (Essie Davis), the wife of a surgeon colleague, and who’s to say if that liaison is not every bit as meaningful as the one transfigured by the wartime past? Perhaps what the war has taught Dorrigo is to grab moments of sensual pleasure when you can.
The drama indirectly discloses mysteries which underpin events: Dorrigo’s unreflective Uncle Keith (an unassumingly good performance from Simon Baker) seems very relaxed about letting his nephew spend quality time with the young second wife he took soon after the death of his first. Is it because he himself feels guilt? That he senses Amy is dissatisfied and is prepared to turn a blind eye to a connection with the nephew he thinks may well die in the war? And what are Dorrigo’s feelings about that or anything else? Both Elordi’s younger and Hinds’s older Dorrigo are opaque – as the older man testily explains to the young journalist: feelings were not as fashionable in the 40s as they are now. And perhaps feelings are what got scorched away by the violence of war.
Any drama with this subject and these scenes – the brutality of the work camps, the terrible poignancy of the PoWs taking a delusional pride in their enforced labour, the muster parades of emaciated men, the confrontations 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 has, I suspect, a tiny echo). Perhaps the key horrible sequence is the hint of friendship between Dorrigo and the relatively kindly Maj Nakamura (Shô Kasamatsu), who then tactlessly reveals to his commanding officer Col Kota (Taki Abe) that he has been almost fraternising with him. Coolly, Kota asks the Major if he has ever beheaded a man, an experience he suggests should be a rite of passage for a Japanese warrior. He orders one shivering Australian captive to kneel in front of him, the increasingly uneasy Major and the rest of the prisoners – just to demonstrate the stance with the sword, just a theoretical test, he assures everyone.
Kurzel handles the material with confidence and storytelling verve and gets fervent, focused performances from Elordi, Hinds and Young.
