The Beguiled.

Dunkirk and the Beguiled are the lat­est his and hers films from Christo­pher Nolan and Sofia Cop­po­la. And if noth­ing else, they’re a slight improve­ment on the ones that they last produced.

Back in 2006, they’d offered up anoth­er pair of his and hers, with the Pres­tige and Marie Antoinette. The for­mer has a denoue­ment that’s so mes­mer­i­cal­ly obvi­ous, that you imme­di­ate­ly dis­miss it as soon as it occurs to you, oh, about 90 sec­onds into the film. Only to dis­cov­er hours lat­er, that yes, that is the expla­na­tion – it’s the one you always sus­pect when it comes to magicians.

The Pres­tige, real­ly?

It’s like lis­ten­ing to one of those jokes that nine year old boys tell. You know what the punch­line is hours before they get to it, but you indulge them any­way. While Marie Antoinette is like watch­ing his eight year old sis­ter parad­ing in her brand new dress, which she refus­es to take off for days. And each time you encounter her, you’re expect­ed to gasp duti­ful­ly in cowed admi­ra­tion. Marie Antoinette is so vac­u­ous and so vapid, that you’d have had dif­fi­cul­ty sit­ting through the entire three min­utes had it been offered up as a sub-Adam Ant pop promo.

What usu­al­ly hap­pens to every­one at that age is that, almost over night, they grow up. But every one in a mil­lion fail to do so. And they con­tin­ue parad­ing their new dress and telling those remark­ably unfun­ny, shag­gy dog sto­ries well into their twen­ties and beyond.

Marie Antoinette.

Here we are then ten years on, and the pair have pro­duced anoth­er cou­ple of films that, once again, are com­plete­ly devoid of any substance.

The Beguiled is a whol­ly un-nec­es­sary remake of a Clint East­wood film, with Col­in Far­rell step­ping in as the soli­tary man way­laid in a house­hold lord­ed over by women. Had it been the lat­est 60 sec­ond Tim­o­tei ad, we could all have sat back and lux­u­ri­at­ed in its glam­orous, glitzy, glossy sur­face. But nine­ty min­utes of pret­ty girls in vin­tage dress­es, their immac­u­late hair back-lit just so, glid­ing in and out of the house from the gar­den begins to pall after a while. I love soft porn as much as the next guy, but even I drift­ed off after a while.

Dunkirk.

While Dunkirk prides itself on not giv­ing any of its char­ac­ters any sort of back sto­ry or his­to­ry, rob­bing them all of any depth or indi­vid­u­al­i­ty. What you have instead is a cast of inter­change­able dark haired sol­diers, let’s call them Play­ers, who need to get from the bot­tom of the screen (France) to the safe­ty of the top of the screen (Eng­land). But in their way, and com­ing at them from all direc­tions, are a suc­ces­sion of cre­ations designed to pre­vent them – tor­pe­does from the sea, Messer­schmidts from the air, and orders from above etc.

The only indi­vid­u­als who are giv­en any form are the Mark Rylance and Cil­lian Mur­phy char­ac­ters, because they’re iso­lat­ed from every­one else on a small boat on its way in the oppo­site direc­tion, from Eng­land to France, which after all is what the sto­ry is sup­posed to have been about. So that they lit­er­al­ly get giv­en space to stand out from the crowd.

Oth­er than which, it’s just the loud­est, most tech­no­log­i­cal­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed ver­sion of Space Invaders you’ll ever see. But who wants to watch a video game you can’t play?

A Sep­a­ra­tion.

If you want a real test for Dunkirk, try watch­ing it on your iPhone. Then try watch­ing, say, A Sep­a­ra­tion – reviewed ear­li­er here. Of course you should nev­er watch a film on any­thing oth­er than the largest screen with the finest sound sys­tem you can find. But two min­utes into A Sep­a­ra­tion, you’ll be lost in the depths of its mes­meris­ing sto­ry. Two min­utes into Dunkirk you’ll be won­der­ing if there’s any­thing hap­pen­ing on your Face­book page.

You can see the trail­er for the Beguiled here, and for Dunkirk here.

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