WATCHING HAMNET

There are now three exceptional pieces of dramatic and literary art centring on the father-son relationships in the life and work of English dramatist William Shakepeare.

Historians of England anchor epochs in the country’s history to the names of monarchs. Shakespeare worked as an actor and dramatist in London, entertaining the court of Elizabeth 1. His most widely known tragedy, and perhaps the most famous play in English, is Hamlet (1602), a revenge drama notable for the high body count in the final scene, comparable to the ultra-kill last scene of L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997).

The play’s the thing that excites a novel and a film into existence.

A novel focusses on the earth-mother character of Agnes, who marries Shakespeare and with whom she has children, including a son called Hamnet (novel, Maggie O’ Farrell, Tinder Press, 2020). This boy is the character that O’Farrell uses to drive the plot towards a final sequence where the ‘play within the novel’ device is used to tantalise the reader with an earnest of opposition to death.

A film Hamnet (Chloe Zhao, 2025) takes the novel and creates a visual and aural wonder, on a semi-dark palette of autumn and forest colours, with intimate speech sounds, whisperings and murmurings, birthing roars and screeches, in forest and bedroom, and the whistling calls of falcons, as they hunt. 

The boy walks into darkness at the end. The mother laughs. 

Tragedy is defeated, in the only way it can be. By laughing, full-throated, in its heartless face.

Shakespeare worked in a time of torrid upheaval, in a country where adventurers and war-makers plundered great wealth and brought it to the Court and the city in London. Much like America today. Hollywood now, London then: that’s where money accumulated and circulated.

Shakespeare yearned to be among it.

Frustrated by his brutal father and his fruitful marriage, he did what many men have done since, right up to today: he protested the importance of his work and abandoned home for London, with the line, present in both the novel and the film, 

my company needs me.

These were occluded times. Agnes will not take her children to London, for fear of pestilence. But it finds her and the young ones. She says of Shakespeare that he has more in his head than any man she knows. Agnes is a sorcerer of herbs from garden and forest for conjuring medicines, with much in her head and in her heart. 

Riches flow from the contents of Shakespeare’s head, conjured into dramas that delight the Court and the public so much that he can buy a big house and land in Stratford, but cannot move back there. 

There is tragedy enough in this, but death, the ultimate tragedy, stalks them. It kills the boy at home and forces a formidable play from his father. Shakespeare writes and produces Hamlet, wherein the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, he told Agnes earlier, is overturned, when the boy does looks back to his mother, who smiles and lets him go.

In Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, Chloe Zhao directs two physically strong and charismatic young Irish actors in exhilarating roles. They are present and convincing. Buckley has received both the Critics’ Choice and Golden Globes awards. Oscar nominations are likely. Supporting actors are strong, especially Emily Watson, re-united with Mescal after their stirring work together in God’s Creatures.

A play within a play; a play within a novel; a play and a novel within a film.

A child within a womb; a child within a grave.

We may not cheat death, but we may salve life and its pains. By art.

Hamlet, play: recommended

Hamnet, novel: recommended.

Hamnet, film: recommended.

See also READING HAMNET (2022)

https://breathingwithalimp.blogspot.com/2022/10/reading-hamnet-thats-n-not-l.html

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END OF 2025 REPORTS ON HMOs FROM A NEIGHBOURLY ASSESSOR ARE IN

                            

A series of ‘end of year assessments’ on progress with HMOs in the neighbourhood of University of Ulster Magee campus (UU Magee) are now available. Summaries follow.

•⁠  ⁠Residents, as members of CRAM (Concerned Residents Around Magee) and individually, received a positive assessment for their diligence in responding to the glut of HMOs. Without their hard work, the drift to Holyland 2 in Derry would have accelerated even more in 2025. Further diligence is required in 2026 to avoid a relapse. ‘Keep up the good work’ is advised.

•⁠  ⁠Councillors and MLAS, notably those who were active on the Planning Committee and elsewhere, made a late surge in December that improved their assessment. This follows the successful delivery of the new Local Development Plan. Formal adoption of the 10% cap in the UU Magee neighbourhood must be an early target for 2026 in order to deliver on this late promise.

•⁠  ⁠Council officials and Planners are praised for effort, while remaining vulnerable to ruses such as CLEUD (Certificate of Lawful Existing Use or Development) and the regulations of PAC (Planning Appeals Commission). Two public meetings by planning officers were useful. Planners insistence on balance is welcomed, though balance remains some way off. All parties are not operating on a level playing field. Assisting councillors with their commitment to a 10% cap will strengthen future assessments.

•⁠  ⁠University of Ulster (UU) is marked ‘must do better’. Their current laissez-fair approach to accommodating students negates their duty of care to them and to their neighbours. Reliance on the Task Force’s Report re: the private sector left UU short, though recent moves at the Desmond’s Strand Road site gives its assessment a late boost. Securing money for a Sports’ facility and teaching facilities highlights the neglect of living accommodation. UU’s neglect of the parking congestion caused by staff and students remains a problem. ‘Must do better’ is the overall assessement.

•⁠  ⁠A number of developers, landlords and their agents failed, not helped by absenteeism and the blatant disregard of local needs by advertising the use of CLEUD (a form of ‘get out of jail free’ card). Planning Purpose Built Student Accommodations (PBSA) without considering car-parking further exacerbates congestion. They need a total re-orientation in the direction of balance, as noted by Planners above, to achieve a better assessment. A re-sit may be on the cards.

•⁠  ⁠Department for Infrastructure (DfI) responded to MLAs and residents’ concerns, but the congestion caused by University expansion led to a lower assessment. Traffic wardens are welcome, though their presence is intermittent, leading to a sense of ‘an accident waiting to happen’. Pressure on services such as fire and rescue, ambulance, buses and refuse collection leaves the end of year assessment for DfI as ‘less than satisfactory’.

A mixed bag in general, with hope for optimism resting with Councillors commitment to a 10% cap on HMOs in the UU Magee neighbourhood, coupled with a focus on balance by Planners and some recent evidence that Purpose Built Student Accommodation may be on the horizon.

© Dave Duggan 2025

The Neighbourly Assessor is Dave Duggan, a writer who lives around the corner from UU Magee.

WATCHING TRAD AT FOYLE FILM FESTIVAL

The 38th Foyle Film Festival (FFF) opened on Wednesday 19^th November with a screening of Lance Daly’s latest film TRAD.

A full house engages in a very warm, frank and informative q&a with writer/producer/director Daly and two cast members. They share insights into their experiences which go much wider than just one film. They illuminate the work, the sacrifices and pleasures, the decisions, set backs, joys and woes of film-making. 

It makes for a splendid film festival evening, the epitome of what such an event could be, ably handled by festival director Christopher Morrison. The FFF welcomes Daly back from a previous occasion when he screened one of his first films, early in the festival’s 38 year history. 

His previous film to TRAD is Black 47, made in 2018, drawing a deserter from British imperial wars in Afghanistan back to his famine-ravaged home in Connemara, where he enacts vengeance, on behalf of his stricken family, on the local soldiery and landlords.

TRAD is a very different film, though set once more in the west of Ireland, within an Irish-speaking family, where the mother is a driven music and dance teacher and the father is an easy-going musician. It is a coming-of-age film for the young woman, Shona McAnally (Megan Nic Fhionnaghaile), who is bursting to get away from the round of féilte, fleadhanna, lessons and rehearsals under her mother’s oppressive drive. Her younger brother Mickey (Dallán Woods) tags along when Shona hooks up with a van-load of summer bohemians, playing music, camping on beaches and ‘having the laugh’, until  Shona ‘shifts’ the handsome banjo player in his tent. 

Mickey calls his Mammy on his hidden phone. Micky goes home. 

Shona walks away from the van and is joined by a shy young guitarist, Ray (Cathal Coade Parker), who has been aching to talk to her. They walk, hitch, busk and camp. He has a decent tent, being a college student from a family with a few bob. They busk south through Mayo and into Galway, as friends and fellows. They reach Galway city and the tension within and between them erupts at Spanish Arch, in a scene beside the Claddagh, where they pitch for the last time. 

Shona destroys her fiddle, in a rage of frustration.

The resolution follows with Shona re-joining her family as a grown-up young woman, though she still wears the hapless green dress her mother gives her for performing at the Fléadh in Mullingar. All elements of the summer journeying are united in a fantastic pub session, with multiple instruments of the Irish tradition and some fine sean-nós dancing. That scene, actually shot in the Four Provinces Pub in Dublin, is a triumph of film-making and editing, fair play to Lance Daly and his colleagues.

The acting is terrific, the scenery is marvellous, the story is thin, but works and the music throughout is tremendous. The editing and direction are superb. Still, I left the cinema unsettled. I cannot recommend the film. 

I was unsettled by the character Harky (Aiden Gillen). He was the clearest manifestation of coercive control I’ve seen on screen for a while. He is older than the others. He owns and drives the van. Having offered a lift home to Shona and Mickey, he drives past their house, then asks Shona to stay on. He doesn’t force her, but he doesn’t make it easy for her to get off. Mickey follows along, until he feels abandoned. The crack goes out of it.

Harky takes all their phones. He controls communication with the outside world. He controls the money, producing a wad of cash when someone says they need food. This moment provides a great slice of dialogue:

- Did you rob a bank?

- No, the banks rob us.

Harky takes them to his base, an isolated ruin, with a large pond in the middle. It is just the spot for someone half-cut to fall into. Someone like Mickey, gargling bottles of booze. Harky regales them all with lists of random words and riddles, never answering a question, passing this off as wisdom, when it has all the characteristics of the worst of cultism: hem the acolytes in, set yourself up as the wise-beyond-comprehension guru, control all aspects of their lives.

Mickey and Shona are lucky to get away from him.

This soured the film for me. I should have asked Lance Daly the question:

Why did you choose an instance of coercive control to launch the young people’s road-trip?

TRAD – recommended? See Black 47 instead.

TRAD; film; Lance Daly; Monto Movies; Ireland, 2025

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WATCHING STILLWATER

Director Thomas McCarthy made the Academy Award-winning film Spotlight (2016). It recounts The Boston Globe’s unravelling of cover-ups of sexual abuse crimes by Roman Catholic clerics and the collusion of Boston law firms. 

His 2021 film Stillwater is available on Channel 4’s catch up service, All 4. While not as strong as Spotlight, it is nonetheless a very insightful treatment of a family tragedy, using a crime thriller story-line to deliver a watchable and moving romance-drama. 

Stillwater presents a telling allegory of the USA today.

These films incline the viewer to keep an eye out for other work by McCarthy.

Bill Baker (Matt Damon) is an American roughneck, built for hard labour on oil rigs and construction sites. He is as taciturn as a mule, but behind the quiet is a fevered anger, stoked by poverty, loss, alcoholism and injustice. He is polite and mannerly. His “Thank you Maam’s” echo throughout the film. He prays with fervour at each meal. His anger - some might term it passion were he middle-class - drives a quest. He lives to prove his daughter’s, Allison Baker (Abigail Breslin), innocence for a crime he is convinced she didn’t commit.     

After a short prologue in Oklahoma, on an oil-field and in his mother-in-law’s house, the film lifts off with Bill when he travels to Marseilles, where his daughter is incarcerated for killing her lover. He has travelled to the French Mediterranean port many times. This trip is different, because he meets Maya, aged 8 (Lilou Siauvard), and her mother Virginie (Camille Cottin).

An uneasy, then warm, relationship grows between the adults, cultivated by Maya’s charm and Bill’s love for the child. There is a running joke at meal-time, when Bill offers hand-holding prayer and invites Maya to conclude with “Dig in”, an echo of his roughneck life. He delivers a great speech about digging and holes through dinner prepartion.

The adults grow closer. In one post-coital, morning-after scene, without dialogue, a gorgeous image of domestic comfort centres on Maya, with colouring pens and paper, grinning knowingly at the adults seated on the nearby sofa. 

Bill has new information. He is determined to track down a local man he is sure will clear his daughter’s name. The search takes him to La Rouvière, Marseille’s city within a city, near the Stade Vélodrome — home to the local football team Olympique de Marseille (OM). Using the stadium as the launch pad for the final scenes fleshes out just how out of his depth, culturally, linguistically and politically Bill is amidst the divisions that characterise Marseilles.

Bill encounters these divisions and the survival techniques people use, when he works for a dodgy builder and makes a solo run into La Rouvière, where he very quickly gets into trouble.

Bill is America, on an individual scale. He just wants to do good. Why can’t people see that? Why won’t people comply? But people have had enough of outsider arrivistes, their demands and their solutions, generally relying on the force of arms or money, as if they were the only people with problems. A friend of Virginie asks Bill if he voted for Trump, expecting him to say ‘yes’. It’s the question and expected answer in the viewer’s mind throughout. 

Alison, Bill’s daughter, is also America, on her own different, individual scale. She just wants to get as far away as possible. Why can’t people let her do what she wants? Why do people bother her? Why won’t people just go away, when she’s had enough of them? But people will take her money to do her bidding, even at great cost to themselves.

Scenes near the end of the film resonate with allegory. 

- A vacuous home-coming for Alison, led by MAGA-yearning politicians and Oklahoma locals, festers cringe. It reminds the viewer of the heart-break of families and the callousness of politicians, as seen in detainee returns in Israel and Palestine recently. 

- Alison sits smoking with Virginie, while on day-release parole. She reveals how broken she feels, without acknowledging that her actions are the driver for the tragedies that grip the people around her.

- Later, she sits on the stoop with her father, in a classic image of America at home. She says the world still looks the same. Bill says it has changed. It will never be the same to him again. The deep malaise in Allison, which she takes to herself, is an allegory for contemporary US society. Bill sees his home place with new eyes, following his experiences out of the country. His trials overseas have given him new insights. Allison sees only herself and her deserving.

Marseilles is Marseilles, in all its beauty and depravity, its vivacity and division. 

Jean-Claude Izzo, a French poet, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist wrote three neo-noir  crime novels set in Marseilles in the 1990s, worth reading for a view of the city’s divisions and the lives people build there: Total Chaos, Chourmo, and Solea.

Stillwater naturally echoes The French Connection, though Bill is not Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle. He is tough enough, but less vicious. His sensibilities are awakened by Maya and Virginie, but his legacy-quest to aid his daughter impels him into violence and tragedy.

Stillwater? Highly recommended.

Stillwater; film; Thomas McCarthy; Participant Media LLC, 2021

French Connection; film; William Friedkin; Philip D’Antoni Productions; 1971

Jean Claude Izzo; writer; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude Izzo

An article on Marseilles: https://themarkaz.org/cities-within-the-city/

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WATCHING ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

When Peter Bradshaw’s film of the week in The Guardian (London) gets a five star review and David Fears in Rolling Stone (New York) describes it as 

a parable about fathers and daughters, a conspiracy thriller for the ICE age, an ensemble comedy that encourages all-stars to get their best eccentricity on, the single greatest film of 2025

One Battle After Another might be a Hollywood film worth seeing. It is. At least twice.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson has a back catalogue of Hollywood art-hits that sets movie moguls drooling. His oil baron epic, There will be Blood, starring Daniel Day Lewis, was listed as ‘the greatest film of of the 21^st Century’ by New York Times critics. 

Is Anderson ‘the thinking person’s Quentin Tarrantino’?

That auteur’s drive is seen in the opening scenes of One Battle After Another, when an underground revolutionary grouping, French 75, led by African American women, releases detainees from a holding centre, while pulverising it. We meet two of the film’s protagonists: Perfidia Beverly Hills, (Teyana Taylor) and "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun / Bob Ferguson, (Leonardo Di Caprio). They exist in a highly sexualised world, charged with the power of her political energies and the explosive materials he uses. Their inter-racial relationship thrives on sex, war and revolution. It is heady stuff, and just about holds together as an extended prologue, to the gear change that shifts time forward 16 years, when a product of their union is introduced. 

We meet Willa Ferguson/Charlene Calhoun (Chase Inifiniti) at a martial arts session with her sensei  Sergio St. Carlos, (Benficio del Toro). He is a Karate teacher and a leader of the off-grid community in Baktan Cross, where ‘wet backs’, immigrants from across the border south of California, find scantuary.

This scene uses the Steely Dan song Dirty Work (from Can’t Buy a Cheap Thrill, 1975) in what one commentator described as ‘the greatest needle drop in cinema today’. Watching and listening to it, the viewer realises that once again Paul Tomas Anderson has drawn from his childhood in Hollywood to put a film experience in front of us that could only come from that cinema-saturated part of the world.

Introducing us to Willa Ferguson re-introduces us to another of the film’s heavy-weight protagonists: Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a military officer hot on the case of the French 75, and most particularly, on the case of Perfidia Beverly Hills. Lockjaw’s obsession with Hills, a not entirely convincing relationship, opens the thread of the story that lampoons far-right ideology and groupings, in particular its fear of miscegenation.

The film’s good guys are leftist radicals, acting against authoritarian elements within the US government. Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) live under assumed names in Baktan Cross, as French 75 goes further underground, with informers penetrating its membership. Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) hunts the group down.

The scenes of the group attacking an immigrant detention centre feel current, rather than historic. Time is eliding over itself and everything is happening now, as it can in the best dramatic work. We are in screen time/stage time/now, with Time’s Arrow perpetually moving forward. The characters age and grow frail (Bob) or feisty (Willa). He becomes a protective, if inept, Dad. She becomes a woman, re-working the energy of her mother. The world changes and la lucha continua (the struggle continues).

Anderson doesn’t offer a handbook for the most effective form of rebellion. He presents Bob’s efforts to reconcile his youthful idealism with his middle-aged caution. Willa embodies the paradox of the future Bob fought for, a simultaneous win and loss, whose responsibility eventually passes to Willa herself. There will be young people fighting fascism, however they can. Anderson offers a moderate, incremental-change vision of political upheaval, along with the admission that things could get much worse. There is no utopia or celebration of political violence by state or anti-state forces. There is simply the endeavour by individuals to band together, to protect themselves from the violence of poverty and oppression, finding hope and love in their young, even as they age. 

They live the necessary indulgence of hoping the fight isn’t over. 

La Lucha Continua. Ahora. Siempre. 

When Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) is loaded into a refuge incinerator by two figures in white hazmat suits, we know the dirty work continues.

I'm a fool to do your dirty work, oh yeah

I don't wanna do your dirty work no more

I'm a fool to do your dirty work, oh yeah

One Battle After Another – recommended? Highly.

One Battle After Another; film; Paul Tomas Anderson; Ghoulardi Film Company; USA; 2025

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