THE RAGGEDY RAWNEY
With Dexter Fletcher, Hoskins, Zoe Nathenson, Dave Hill, Ian Dury, and Zoe Wanamaker.
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(3) Inspired by a legend told to Hoskins as a child by his grandmother that reportedly can be traced all the way back to the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1443), the movie is nonetheless given a setting so vaguely defined that the best description I’ve seen yet (published in the synopsis in Monthly Film Bulletin) is: “Sometime during the first half of the 20th century, in a European country at war.” On the other hand, if it were set during the Hundred Years’ War, that probably wouldn’t have helped; the best film that comes to mind that dealt with that war–John Huston’s A Walk With Love and Death (1969), starring his daughter Angelica in her first major role–was possibly the biggest flop of his career, and it’s virtually impossible to see nowadays.
(4) Clearly conceived of in part as an antiwar statement, Hoskins’s film is currently playing in a somewhat war-happy country that happens to be gearing up for a brand-new war–a country, moreover, where gung-ho military celebrations are conceived as commercial entertainments and antiwar movies are perceived as propagandistic, old-hat, and decidedly unhip sermons. (“Preaching to the converted” is a typical reviewer’s indictment of the latter. Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams is another casualty of this climate; its antiwar message can’t possibly approach the appeal of the same director’s war pictures, like Kagemusha. At the same time, however, it should be acknowledged that this apparent war fever may be only temporary; as a recent Nation editorial astutely put it, “Like many of Hollywood’s disappointing summer blockbusters that started out big but shriveled after a few weeks, Bush’s new war may not have legs.”)
Finally, the absence of any fixed genre means that we have to either suspend or continually readjust many of our expectations while we’re watching the film–and that we can never easily anticipate what’s coming next because we have no tradition or context to refer back to. The characters and the world that they inhabit grow before our eyes and take on an increasing familiarity and complexity, but the absence of the usual comforting definitions also allows them to retain their mystery. We usually depend on an elaborate system of narrative anchors to guide us through a movie plot, and Hoskins is no different from other filmmakers when it comes to providing us with people, places, and a history; it is only when we ask for the precise intersections between our own history and that of the characters that the film remains cryptic and silent. It’s a kind of mystery that I respect and value, because it assumes the existence of a kind of parallel universe and invites the audience to discover their own points of entry.
