Award season is upon us. More specifically, the world’s (America’s) most obsessed over and highly coveted (meh) Academy Awards: The Oscars. Or as they’re otherwise known to fellow cinephiles, the awards which famously choose the wrong films.
*Insert cliche quote of ‘art-being-subjective’ here*
Before you suspect me of being protective over some of my personal favourite films/filmmakers that have been ignored in the past (*cough* The Dark Knight) I think we should identify a distinction between films/filmmakers that haven’t won an Academy Award, and those that haven’t been nominated. I will be focusing on the latter. The evidence for the Oscar’s consistent ignorance and incompetence is ubiquitous throughout cinematic history. The fact that Celine Sciamma’s 2019 modern masterpiece Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the Coen Brothers’ genre-bending, cult classic The Big Lebowski (1998), Wong Kar-Wai’s romantic benchmark In the Mood for Love (2000), or Yasujiro Ozu’s 1953 magnum opus Tokyo Story (universally cited as one of the greatest films of all time) didn’t receive a single nomination (note the prevalent amount of international films amongst the aforementioned list- a lack of recognition for which the Academy Awards is only recently beginning to tackle) is damn right scandalous. In short, I think we can all agree that the awards are unequivocally antiquated and have got a long way to go.
Predictably, this year’s nomination lists have garnered mixed receptions. Though Greta Gerwig’s billion-dollar Barbie fetched 8 nominations (including ‘Best Picture’), the Lady Bird and Little Women maestro missed out for her directing efforts. Other notable omissions include Leonardo DiCaprio’s absence from the ‘Best Actor’ category and Celine Song’s exclusion from the ‘Best Director’ list. The biggest shock for many, however, was the absence of Margot Robbie’s name on the ‘Best Actress’ list for her pitch-perfect, tour-de-force performance in Barbie. In my opinion though, the most bizarre film to join the zero-nomination club is the greatest film (yeah I know, it’s subjective blah blah blah) of the 2023/24 batch of new releases. This is, of course, Harrogate-born Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers. The following doesn’t intend to be a comprehensive review of the film, but rather a bitesize, spoiler-free pitch for why you should immediately go and seek out British cinema’s latest gem (and yes, I know Paul Mescal with a Yorkshire accent is reason enough alone to go and see it on the big screen).
Loosely inspired by and reworked from Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, Haigh’s fifth feature film (conjuring up cinematic spirits from his own personal and professional past) is a mournful and melancholic ode to the ghostly apparitions of familial and romantic love, processed via a uniquely cultivated queer lens that re-assesses the concept of nostalgia by examining the consequences of structural and systemic homophobia. It’s almost impossible to know where to begin with this remarkable film because there’s so much to love about it (whether it be the stunning central performances, the instantly iconic soundtrack with classic hits such as the Pet Shop Boys’ rendition of ‘Always on My Mind’ paired with the beautifully complimentary score, the time-slipping cinematography, or the astoundingly emotional audience reactions that I witnessed on the opening night in the cinema) and yet the less you know about it, the (hopefully) more profound the experience of witnessing this film for the first time will be. Without giving too much away, the film follows the central protagonist Adam (Andrew Scott)- a failing screenwriter grappling for creative inspiration whilst living in a monolithic tower block in London. Along comes everyone’s favourite antidote to toxic masculinity: Paul Mescal. The arrival of Mescal’s Harry, who rocks up with a bottle of whiskey and a beautiful bubble-gum pink sweater, appears to trigger a supernatural ripple of meditations on Adam’s own mechanisms for processing memory, grief, and trauma concerning the death of his parents some thirty years ago. What ostensibly begins as a contemporary riff on traditional ghost narratives about familial loss and the writing process (e.g. The Shining, Barton Fink, The Haunting of Hill House etc..), manifests itself into a brooding and intricately interwoven exploration of trauma. In many ways, the film shares more thematic parallels to a similarly under-awarded British feature, Charlotte Wells’ debut Aftersun (maybe save the double-bill for a particularly melancholic day). Not only because Mescal’s meditation on fractured masculinity via trauma and memory is illustrated in his performances in both films, but also, because they similarly reflect on how the elusive form of film itself can be utilised to conjure up apparitional spirits of the past through the cinematic passage of time and memory. In Haigh’s picture, Andrew Scott gives a career-best performance, with supporting roles by Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, and Claire Foy who are all given their own moment of reconciliation with Scott’s protagonist that are every bit as heartbreaking as the film’s brilliant use of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘The Power of Love’. Ultimately, the film’s triumph lies in its perfectly nuanced deliberation over the tragic projections of fantasy and reality, perhaps concluding that the illusion of the juxtaposition is seemingly irrelevant if you can make peace with the past.
Image Credit: TMDB, Youtube,Spotify