TWO MOVIES, ONE CORE
These two movies can’t be further apart in content. One is a grand war epic set in WWI , and the other is an intimate portrait of two people in a tiny, remote Irish village.
An adaptation of one of the most well-known anti-war novels, ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ is the heart-wrenching story of the transformation of a naive young soldier, Paul Bäumer, who, like many youngsters at the time, buys into in the mythical glory of sacrificing oneself for the sake of fatherland, into a man hardened by the brutal realities of war. The sheer scale of the canvas is at once breathtaking and utterly shattering to the spirit.
Diametrically opposite to ‘All Quiet…’, which captures the barbarity of war from the perspective of the soldier on the battlefield in painstaking detail, is ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’, which follows the story of two friends who fall out. Pádraic, the protagonist, is devastated when his lifelong pal and drinking buddy Colm suddenly announces that he doesn’t want to be friends with him anymore. How Pádraic doggedly tries to win his friend back while Colm, with equal determination, resists his efforts with increasingly bizarre but drastic ultimatums tells this bittersweet tale that is darkly funny but equally poignant.
Beautifully staged, enacted and picturised ‘All Quiet…’ is one of the best-ever war films I’ve ever seen. It is most definitely deserving of all the accolades it is garnering in all aspects of filmmaking. ‘The Banshees…’ is equally well-staged, and acted to perfection by Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson et al. but on a scale that is very intimate, in contrast to the grandness of ‘All Quiet…’.
One thing binds the two stories at the core though — both tell the story of a man who is forced to transform into something very alien to himself, through the vagaries of circumstances that are well beyond his control. While Paul is forced to survive the savage battlefield and live through the loss of his closest friends and his ideals, Pádraic is forced to survive the ridicule and scrutiny of everyone in the village, while dealing with the loss of the one person he thought was his womb-to-tomb friend.
By the end of their respective stories, both men are so completely transformed that they become unrecognisable from the beginning of their stories, in ways that are heartbreakingly irreversible, albeit under very disparate circumstances. This transformation binds the two movies with the same thread.
Brilliant, both. Highly recommended.
More information:
Leave a Reply