Parky at the Pictures (DVD 27/6/2019)

At some point in 2014, a number of ordinary residents of a town in the so-called `Occupied Territory' are ushered out of a make-up trailer and made to wait in an alleyway. Several explosions are heard nearby, but these people are not in a live combat zone. Instead, they are eyewitnesses for hire contributing to a fake TV news report about an attack on a bus and they give their testimony and denounce the `fascist' regime in Kiev with a polished sense of petrified outrage. 

The scene shifts to a provincial town hall somewhere in Ukraine, as a woman (Olesya Zhurakovskaya) who has been accused of taking bribes by the local paper interrupts a meeting to pour a bucket of effluence over the mayor (Grigori Masliuk) and argue on camera with the wife of the newspaper owner (Liudmilla Smorodina) about the legitimacy of her tactics in the face of legal and bureaucratic indifference. Meanwhile, in a maternity hospital in Eastern Ukraine, Boris Mikhailovitch (Boris Kamorzin) shows the patients and staff members the foodstuffs and medicines that have been squirrelled away in his office by a corrupt doctor (Evgeni Chepurnyak). Posing as a man of the people, Boris promises to distribute the goods as soon as he has completed an inventory. But he is in cahoots with the physician and flirts with a buxom nurse after concluding their illicit deal. 

At a remote Ukrainian checkpoint, Boris is stopped by a soldier who thinks he recognises him. An underling suggests he's an MP, but the computer is broken when they radio in for a background search and Boris and his cohort are allowed to proceed. They are passed by a bus going in the opposite direction and, to the accompanying sound of a boy playing a handheld video game, two women discuss the prospect of finding their homes in one piece after being driven out by enemy shelling. When the driver is flagged over, a soldier comes aboard and makes a cursory search for weapons. He is more interested in finding some lard to cook with and an elderly woman gives him half of her own supply.

Once over the frontier into the Occupied Territory, the vehicle is pulled over at a separatist outpost and the menfolk are forced to get out, strip to the waist and listen to a rant about their cowardice for not having volunteered for the cause. The interrogation is temporarily interrupted when a Cossack guard announces he has caught a fascist. In fact, German journalist (Thorsten Merten) is simply covering the conflict and he has to do some fast talking in broken Russian to establish his innocence. As he is released with a caution, however, the guard curses that his grandfather probably supported Hitler. 

Somewhere close by near the frontline, a soldier finds a jar of pickles in a storeroom and brings them out to share with the comrades sitting on a tank in the snow. The German journalist arrives with his photographer-cum-translator (Olexandr Techynskyi) and notice that three troops refuse to be snapped and have difficulty naming the nearby village. When the reporter asks if he can speak to the commander, the men launch into an anti-Spartacus routine, as they each deny having any authority. Even a man who clearly resembles an officer passes the buck to a bearded fellow (Sergei Russkin) who declares that his army is intent on removing fascists from Western Ukraine in the same way that his ancestors had purged Nazi Germany. As he finishes his speech, a missile lands behind them and the screen goes black. 

Peering through the darkness, a man opens the door of a city bomb shelter in the Occupied Territory. He guides an unseen figure through the cramped quarters, where people are huddled together in the cold and damp. A small boy takes over to point out the sick and the scared before we see the visitor (Irina Plesnyayeva) being reunited with her mother (Nina Antonova). The fake news report is playing on the television, as the well-dressed blonde empties a shopping bag of essentials and goodies (including caviar) and pleads with her mother to leave the shelter and live in comfort with her. She assures her that the neighbourhood is safe and urges her to leave the `scum' she is slumming it with. However, the old lady locks herself into an end room and refuses to budge, as her daughter hammers at the door and becomes increasingly hysterical.

Stalking out to her waiting husband in a four-wheel drive, the blonde snaps when he suggests that some of his boys could forcibly remove her mother. Having been delayed at a level crossing, she is still in a foul mood when she returns to the regional government building where she works in the Occupied Territory. Her boss (Vadim Dubovsky) is meeting with a woman (Zhanna Lubgane) who is trying to persuade him to lay on special arrangements for a touring exhibition of relics belonging to martyr Theodosius of Kherson and St Curila Plenkovic, that she is organising to highlight the link between holiness and heroism and draw attention to the plight of Novorossiya (which was the name given to the southern tracts of the old Russian Empire). 

Fobbing them off with vague approval for their initiative, the boss ushers them out and looks out of his window to see a platoon leader punishing one of his men for looting. He is beaten with sticks by his comrades, although they vote to let another prisoner off with a warning, as it was his first offence. Meanwhile, at police headquarters elsewhere in the Occupied Zone, Simeon (Alexander Zamurayev) tries to reclaim a requisitioned car from Batanya (Georgii Deliev). The bearded man sits behind a desk strewn with mobile phones and tablets and he pauses to check the ones that ring while exhorting Simeon to sign a piece of paper entrusting his vehicle to the cause. When he hesitates, Batanya demands to see his documents and threatens to detain him so that he cannot collect his daughter from kindergarten. His tone becomes more menacing when he asks whether Simeon backs the fascists, but he realises he has no choice in the matter when Batanya is informed that Simeon has wealthy friends and orders him to make a sizeable donation to the separatist coffers, as well as signing over his Jeep.

As Simeon is escorted into a room full of other businessmen pleading with their associates to wire them funds so they can leave, a duty officer is called away to an emergency. A prisoner (Valeri Antoniuk) with a Ukrainian flag around his neck has been tied to a post on the street with a sign on his chest denouncing him as an extermination squad volunteer. He is there so that people can look the enemy in the eye. But a passing carload of slackers insist on posing for selfies with him and even rope in some passing girls to join them. A crowd begins to gather and a middle-aged woman asks the captive to reveal the identity of his masters and how much he has been paid to lay mines to kill small children. He swears that he was only in the catering corps, but no one believes him and punches start to rain in on him. The soldiers make a half-hearted attempt to protect him and have to lead him away when the mob turns nasty and calls for the detainee to be executed. 

In a small town in the Occupied Territory, a wedding party arrives at the registry office. Gunshots are fired as the bride emerges from a stretch limo and registrar (Natalya Buzko) quickly realises that Ivan (Evgeni Chistyakov) and Angela (Svetlana Kolesova) are as rowdy as their guests, as they mug their way through the ceremony and draw raucous cheers from their friends when they kiss. As several of those in attendance had been baiting the Ukrainian captive, they scarcely need a patriotic anthem to whip them into a frenzy. But the registrar achieves a sufficient level of silence to announce that the couple have adopted the surname of Fried-Egg. 

A couple of tongue-tied soldiers make a speech and a female member of parliament reads a poem before the guests storm the stage for selfies. The troops file out of the building and drive off in Simeon's commandeered car. Meanwhile, another vehicle approaches a Ukrainian checkpoint as a bus bomb goes off in the queue. As others U-turn and speed away, the unseen female driver gets out to survey the damage and sees bodies on the tarmac (in contrast to the stage-managed scene witnessed earlier). Nearby, a pair of rocket launcher trucks hit the road and a following car is ambushed by soldiers in Simeon's vehicle. 

Coming full circle, we return to the make-up trailer, as the woman who was interviewed in the first sequence (Tamara Yatsenko) tells her colleagues to cheer up. However, a soldier enters and guns them all down before beating a hasty retreat before the police and an ambulance arrive to establish a crime scene. The camera looks on from a discrete distance, as witnesses prepare to give their statements to a TV crew and we hear the director asking one woman to repeat her lines so they can get a wide shot. She delivers her spiel verbatim before likening the victims to angels, as they had been part of a film unit that hadn't been done any harm to anyone.  

The irony of the latter testimony will not be lost on the audience, as it watches the fabrications being meticulously woven around the truth. But, while this sprawling snapshot of a writhing nation seethes with serious intent, Loznitsa prefers to use satire to expose the mania and the manipulation, the intimidation and the injustice, the fear and the farce. Few will have any doubts about where his sympathies lie, but there is no whitewashing or airbrushing here. The whole sorry mess is laid out for our edification and it's impossible not to be saddened and shocked by what has come to pass for everyday life. 

Exceptionally photographed with by Romanian Oleg Mutu with a recklessly restless camera that refuses to stick to the script, the tonally diverse vignettes etch the caricatures with a scalpel-like precision that says as much for the skill of the cast as for Loznitsa's writing and direction. As is to be expected, this is a scattershot enterprise with sequences like the German reporter's terrifying encounter with the snarling Cossacks, the grimly matter-of-fact tour of the bomb shelter and the sinisterly civilised misappropriation of a smug bourgeois's car being stronger than others. But the clear standouts are the hideous humiliation of the captured foe and the speed with which the good-natured baiting turns into murderous mayhem and the darkly comic wedding ceremony that sees Natalya Buzko shoot so many disapproving looks at the dome-headed Evgeni Chistyakov and the blowsy Svetlana Kolesova that she almost seems to be taking her life into her own hands each time she strives to regain control of a situation that excruciatingly reflects the wider breakdown of an entire social order.

As versatile as he is prolific, Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa is rapidly becoming one of Europe's most essential voices. In addition to the fictional features My Joy (2010), In the Fog (2012) and A Gentle Creature (2017), he has also produced award-winning observational documentaries like Maidan (2014) and Victory Day (2018) and such acute archival actualities as The Event (2015), Austerlitz (2016) and The Trial (2018). Now, he turns his attention to the Donetsk People's Republic in Donbass, a 13-segment study of a nation in crisis that reflects Loznitsa's anger and impotence at the ongoing chaos in the eastern region of his homeland. 

At some point in 2014, a number of ordinary residents of a town in the so-called `Occupied Territory' are ushered out of a make-up trailer and made to wait in an alleyway. Several explosions are heard nearby, but these people are not in a live combat zone. Instead, they are eyewitnesses for hire contributing to a fake TV news report about an attack on a bus and they give their testimony and denounce the `fascist' regime in Kiev with a polished sense of petrified outrage. 

The scene shifts to a provincial town hall somewhere in Ukraine, as a woman (Olesya Zhurakovskaya) who has been accused of taking bribes by the local paper interrupts a meeting to pour a bucket of effluence over the mayor (Grigori Masliuk) and argue on camera with the wife of the newspaper owner (Liudmilla Smorodina) about the legitimacy of her tactics in the face of legal and bureaucratic indifference. Meanwhile, in a maternity hospital in Eastern Ukraine, Boris Mikhailovitch (Boris Kamorzin) shows the patients and staff members the foodstuffs and medicines that have been squirrelled away in his office by a corrupt doctor (Evgeni Chepurnyak). Posing as a man of the people, Boris promises to distribute the goods as soon as he has completed an inventory. But he is in cahoots with the physician and flirts with a buxom nurse after concluding their illicit deal. 

At a remote Ukrainian checkpoint, Boris is stopped by a soldier who thinks he recognises him. An underling suggests he's an MP, but the computer is broken when they radio in for a background search and Boris and his cohort are allowed to proceed. They are passed by a bus going in the opposite direction and, to the accompanying sound of a boy playing a handheld video game, two women discuss the prospect of finding their homes in one piece after being driven out by enemy shelling. When the driver is flagged over, a soldier comes aboard and makes a cursory search for weapons. He is more interested in finding some lard to cook with and an elderly woman gives him half of her own supply.

Once over the frontier into the Occupied Territory, the vehicle is pulled over at a separatist outpost and the menfolk are forced to get out, strip to the waist and listen to a rant about their cowardice for not having volunteered for the cause. The interrogation is temporarily interrupted when a Cossack guard announces he has caught a fascist. In fact, German journalist (Thorsten Merten) is simply covering the conflict and he has to do some fast talking in broken Russian to establish his innocence. As he is released with a caution, however, the guard curses that his grandfather probably supported Hitler. 

Somewhere close by near the frontline, a soldier finds a jar of pickles in a storeroom and brings them out to share with the comrades sitting on a tank in the snow. The German journalist arrives with his photographer-cum-translator (Olexandr Techynskyi) and notice that three troops refuse to be snapped and have difficulty naming the nearby village. When the reporter asks if he can speak to the commander, the men launch into an anti-Spartacus routine, as they each deny having any authority. Even a man who clearly resembles an officer passes the buck to a bearded fellow (Sergei Russkin) who declares that his army is intent on removing fascists from Western Ukraine in the same way that his ancestors had purged Nazi Germany. As he finishes his speech, a missile lands behind them and the screen goes black. 

Peering through the darkness, a man opens the door of a city bomb shelter in the Occupied Territory. He guides an unseen figure through the cramped quarters, where people are huddled together in the cold and damp. A small boy takes over to point out the sick and the scared before we see the visitor (Irina Plesnyayeva) being reunited with her mother (Nina Antonova). The fake news report is playing on the television, as the well-dressed blonde empties a shopping bag of essentials and goodies (including caviar) and pleads with her mother to leave the shelter and live in comfort with her. She assures her that the neighbourhood is safe and urges her to leave the `scum' she is slumming it with. However, the old lady locks herself into an end room and refuses to budge, as her daughter hammers at the door and becomes increasingly hysterical.

Stalking out to her waiting husband in a four-wheel drive, the blonde snaps when he suggests that some of his boys could forcibly remove her mother. Having been delayed at a level crossing, she is still in a foul mood when she returns to the regional government building where she works in the Occupied Territory. Her boss (Vadim Dubovsky) is meeting with a woman (Zhanna Lubgane) who is trying to persuade him to lay on special arrangements for a touring exhibition of relics belonging to martyr Theodosius of Kherson and St Curila Plenkovic, that she is organising to highlight the link between holiness and heroism and draw attention to the plight of Novorossiya (which was the name given to the southern tracts of the old Russian Empire). 

Fobbing them off with vague approval for their initiative, the boss ushers them out and looks out of his window to see a platoon leader punishing one of his men for looting. He is beaten with sticks by his comrades, although they vote to let another prisoner off with a warning, as it was his first offence. Meanwhile, at police headquarters elsewhere in the Occupied Zone, Simeon (Alexander Zamurayev) tries to reclaim a requisitioned car from Batanya (Georgii Deliev). The bearded man sits behind a desk strewn with mobile phones and tablets and he pauses to check the ones that ring while exhorting Simeon to sign a piece of paper entrusting his vehicle to the cause. When he hesitates, Batanya demands to see his documents and threatens to detain him so that he cannot collect his daughter from kindergarten. His tone becomes more menacing when he asks whether Simeon backs the fascists, but he realises he has no choice in the matter when Batanya is informed that Simeon has wealthy friends and orders him to make a sizeable donation to the separatist coffers, as well as signing over his Jeep.

As Simeon is escorted into a room full of other businessmen pleading with their associates to wire them funds so they can leave, a duty officer is called away to an emergency. A prisoner (Valeri Antoniuk) with a Ukrainian flag around his neck has been tied to a post on the street with a sign on his chest denouncing him as an extermination squad volunteer. He is there so that people can look the enemy in the eye. But a passing carload of slackers insist on posing for selfies with him and even rope in some passing girls to join them. A crowd begins to gather and a middle-aged woman asks the captive to reveal the identity of his masters and how much he has been paid to lay mines to kill small children. He swears that he was only in the catering corps, but no one believes him and punches start to rain in on him. The soldiers make a half-hearted attempt to protect him and have to lead him away when the mob turns nasty and calls for the detainee to be executed. 

In a small town in the Occupied Territory, a wedding party arrives at the registry office. Gunshots are fired as the bride emerges from a stretch limo and registrar (Natalya Buzko) quickly realises that Ivan (Evgeni Chistyakov) and Angela (Svetlana Kolesova) are as rowdy as their guests, as they mug their way through the ceremony and draw raucous cheers from their friends when they kiss. As several of those in attendance had been baiting the Ukrainian captive, they scarcely need a patriotic anthem to whip them into a frenzy. But the registrar achieves a sufficient level of silence to announce that the couple have adopted the surname of Fried-Egg. 

A couple of tongue-tied soldiers make a speech and a female member of parliament reads a poem before the guests storm the stage for selfies. The troops file out of the building and drive off in Simeon's commandeered car. Meanwhile, another vehicle approaches a Ukrainian checkpoint as a bus bomb goes off in the queue. As others U-turn and speed away, the unseen female driver gets out to survey the damage and sees bodies on the tarmac (in contrast to the stage-managed scene witnessed earlier). Nearby, a pair of rocket launcher trucks hit the road and a following car is ambushed by soldiers in Simeon's vehicle. 

Coming full circle, we return to the make-up trailer, as the woman who was interviewed in the first sequence (Tamara Yatsenko) tells her colleagues to cheer up. However, a soldier enters and guns them all down before beating a hasty retreat before the police and an ambulance arrive to establish a crime scene. The camera looks on from a discrete distance, as witnesses prepare to give their statements to a TV crew and we hear the director asking one woman to repeat her lines so they can get a wide shot. She delivers her spiel verbatim before likening the victims to angels, as they had been part of a film unit that hadn't been done any harm to anyone.  

The irony of the latter testimony will not be lost on the audience, as it watches the fabrications being meticulously woven around the truth. But, while this sprawling snapshot of a writhing nation seethes with serious intent, Loznitsa prefers to use satire to expose the mania and the manipulation, the intimidation and the injustice, the fear and the farce. Few will have any doubts about where his sympathies lie, but there is no whitewashing or airbrushing here. The whole sorry mess is laid out for our edification and it's impossible not to be saddened and shocked by what has come to pass for everyday life. 

Exceptionally photographed with by Romanian Oleg Mutu with a recklessly restless camera that refuses to stick to the script, the tonally diverse vignettes etch the caricatures with a scalpel-like precision that says as much for the skill of the cast as for Loznitsa's writing and direction. As is to be expected, this is a scattershot enterprise with sequences like the German reporter's terrifying encounter with the snarling Cossacks, the grimly matter-of-fact tour of the bomb shelter and the sinisterly civilised misappropriation of a smug bourgeois's car being stronger than others. But the clear standouts are the hideous humiliation of the captured foe and the speed with which the good-natured baiting turns into murderous mayhem and the darkly comic wedding ceremony that sees Natalya Buzko shoot so many disapproving looks at the dome-headed Evgeni Chistyakov and the blowsy Svetlana Kolesova that she almost seems to be taking her life into her own hands each time she strives to regain control of a situation that excruciatingly reflects the wider breakdown of an entire social order.

Already a bestselling author in her native France, Amanda Sthers is equally keen to be taken seriously as a film-maker. Those unconvinced by the six-storied airport saga, You'll Miss Me (2009), and the Toni Colette-Harvey Keitel class comedy Madame (2017), will find little to change their mind in Holy Lands, a drearily misjudge melodrama that benefits solely from the byplay between James Caan as a Nazareth pig farmer and Tom Hollander as the rabbi trying to put him out of business, which vaguely recalls the dynamic between parish priest Don Camillo Tarocci and Communist mayor Peppone Bottazzi in the comic novels of Giovannino Guareschi. 

Retired New York cardiologist Harry Rosenmerck (James Caan) has left ex-wife Monica (Rosanna Arquette), playwright son David (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and photographer daughter, Annabelle (Efrat Dor) Stateside to settle outside Nazareth and rear pigs. He rootles around on his small property and has problems with a hand-reared piglet who keeps getting into the house at night and trying to clamber into bed with him. Vehemently opposed to his business is rabbi Moshe Cattan (Tom Hollander), who has placed warning signs around the neighbourhood and keeps writing letters threatening to take action unless Harry closes down. When he finally replies, Harry lets Moshe know in no uncertain terms that he has no intention of buckling while a café in Tel Aviv keeps taking orders for his bacon.

David is also a regular correspondent and he scribbles a nagging note while watching a rehearsal of his latest production, Origins, which is rooted in his difficult relationship with his father and the fallout of his revelation that he is gay. Annabelle is also having problems, as she can't make her rent and asks Monica to call her father and drop a hint about a handout. However, Harry is too preoccupied to listen when Monica calls and doesn't take in that she is going for an MRI scan because she has been having dizzy spells. 

While she learns she only has a year to live from Dr Michel (Patrick Bruel), who has adored her from the day she first met Harry, Annabelle leaves Brussels with a broken heart and write to her father about how much she needed his shoulder to cry on. She arrives in time for opening night and they see Monica in the audience, as the lights dim and a piece of interpretive dance is followed by the comic epistolary exchanges between the characters David has based on his parents. Many miles away, Harry is have a contretemps of his own with Moshe, when he comes to the rabbi's door to snap a protest sign over his knee and threaten to clout him if he keeps harassing him. They meet again shortly afterwards at a bus stop, as Harry is going to the cemetery to visit his mother's grave and Moshe has to apologise for sarcastically asking if he's going on a date at his age. 

Returning home to find his piglet (now named Judas) has run amuck in his living room, Harry muddles along, while David sends him a letter about helping Annabelle develop the pictures she had taken on 9/11 and left on the roll because she was unable to face what they might contain. He confides that he had always felt responsible for the Twin Towers, as that was the day he had first slept with another man. Annabelle is planning to visit Harry and Monica entrusts her with a message to insert into the Wailing Wall. Meanwhile, Harry receives a visit from a Belgian priest (Thibaut Pira Van Overeem), who wants him to move off the land because the Pope has identified it as the place where Jesus lived with Mary and Joseph. But Harry is no more amenable to him than he has been to Moshe, although he has accepted the latter's invitation to Shabbat supper. 

Having called Monica to hear her news, Harry is feeling low and Moshe and his wife Rivka (Reem Kherici) try to cheer him up during the meal. One of their small children even offers him a teddy bear to cuddle and they making grunting noises when he bunks down for the night in their room because he is too tired to drive home. Annabelle has also found out about Monica by reading her note on the plane and she seeks solace in the arms of a stranger when the air-raid siren sounds while she is photographing a Tel Aviv beach party. David also needs some tlc when his adoption application is rejected because of his homosexuality and lover Lawrence (Thierry Harcourt) promises that they will find a child somehow, even if it means stealing an ugly duckling from the park.

Much to his surprise, Harry makes a connection with Moshe's youngest son, when he collects him from school and he delights in bottle-feeding Judas in the front seat. By contrast, Annabelle has a run-in with an Israeli soldier (Guila Clara Kessous) when she goes to the place where she had spent childhood summers and is appalled to see the Wall scarring the landscape. She criticises the treatment of the Palestinians at the checkpoint, but the trooper refuses to listen to her sentimental outsider claptrap and sends her on her way. When she finally arrives at the farm, Harry slaps her for not letting him know where she was and they patch up when they visit her grandmother's grave and they wonder why people bury themselves when they're alive and dead.

With Monica taking Harry's advice to enjoy herself with Michel, Annabelle goes to the Wailing Wall and returns to find Harry dozing in a chair. She takes the key to his locked upstairs room and finds the wall covered in cuttings about David and a drawer full of her letters. Back in New York, she discovers she's pregnant from her tryst at the beach and Monica accompanies her to a scan. They go to see a movie in 3-D, but Monica refuses to wear the glasses and leaves early so she can go and berate the first grade teacher she has always hated for giving her daughter a hard time. She also tracks down the drama critic who had dismissed David's play and throws a glass of water in his face in a restaurant and tells him to stop being so mean.

On a Dead Sea beach, Harry and Moshe wear mud packs and debate the reasons why Jews oppose the keeping and killing of pigs and Harry wishes they could agree to disagree and jokes that Muslims have it right when they accuse Jews of over-thinking things. Having floated in the sea, they drive home singing along to Jimmy Cliff's `Many Rivers to Cross'. However, they find a burning cross outside the farm and Judas slaughtered on the front step and Harry grabs a baseball bat and asks Moshe to drive him to the church where the Belgian hangs out. As he swings at the votive candles, however, he suffers a seizure and Moshe has to steel himself to run into the church and help him. 

While Harry recovers in hospital, Lawrence threatens to leave David unless he goes to see Monica, who has suddenly started to fade. He accuses him of hiding behind his father's emotional coldness and pleads with him to open the door the next time Monica returns his washing. But they stand on opposite sides of the door with their hands pressed against the wood and Monica dies soon after going on a shopping expedition to buy her granddaughter presents that will take her through to 21, so she can always be her fairy grandmother. Annabelle's waters break when she bangs on David's door to tell him and he rushes her to the hospital. 

On hearing the news, Harry dictates a letter to Moshe so that David knows he sobbed on losing the love of his life, as he hadn't on the passing of the mother who had survived the camps when his father had perished. In his mind's eye, he has always thought of his son as the boy he had invested so many hopes in and that his silence was filled with as much love, even though he could never hear it. Harry thanks Moshe for his friendship and he posts the letter on his behalf, as we see Annabelle's monochrome photograph of the family that somehow stayed together, even when it was apart. 

Crammed with contrivance and gushing with schmaltz, Amanda Sthers's adaptation of her own novel would be almost unbearable to watch without the sequences involving James Caan and his impish piglet and his badinage with Tom Hollander. Sthers switches the action revolving around Caan's loved ones from Paris to New York, but she singularly fails to persuade the audience to feel anything for the dying Rosanna Arquette, the preening Jonathan Rhys Meyers and the bland Efrat Dor. She doesn't help her cause in this regard by frequently inserting dance routines from Rhys Meyers's ghastly play to comment on the cumbersome melodramatics. But the dialogue the threesome is saddled with is far inferior to the spikier exchanges between Caan and his religious persecutors. 

More relaxed here than he was in Carol Morley's Out of Blue, Caan revels in playing the provocateur. But the decision to explore his backstory solely in the voiceovered letters misfires, as the details feel like throwaway remarks rather than vital clues to understanding his personality. Indeed, even the burgeoning friendship between Caan and Hollander feels forced, as their antagonism falls away too conveniently. However, they share a chemistry and Hollander more than holds his own in playing a variation on his vicar character in the BBC sitcom, Rev (2010-14). Both are upstaged by Judas, however. 

While some may be surprised by the slightness of Sthers's insights into love, family, faith and death and the heavy handedness of much of her direction, she partially atones with her use of the Israeli locations and cinematographer Régis Blondeau's deft contrasts between the interiors designed by Françoise Joset and Shahar Bar Adon. But Grégoire Hetzel's saccharine score keeps reminding us of how mawkish and unpersuasive this all is.

Having earned BAFTA nominations for the shorts Je t'aime John Wayne (2000) and Heavy Metal Drummer (2006), Toby MacDonald makes the step up to features with Old Boys, which relocates the Cyrano de Bergerac story to a neverland boarding school setting that appears to be hovering in an indeterminate time zone encompassing the last 30 years. Conjured by Freddy Syborn and Luke Ponte, the satirical tone owes debts to such classroom classics as Lindsay Anderson's If... (1968), Bill Forsyth's Gregory's Girl (1980) and Wes Anderson's Rushmore (1998). But, while it may not be particularly original and its insights into class, gender and toxically privileged masculinity lack incisiveness, this is puppyishly ingratiating and splendidly played by a fine ensemble. 

With its motto, `Virilitor Age' (`Act Manfully'), Caldermount College is the last bastion of the kind of macho boorishness that Dr Thomas Arnold hoped he had eradicated in the mid-19th century. Consequently, sensitive scholarship boy Martin Amberson (Alex Lawther) doesn't fit in at all, in spite of his efforts to impress his classmates by trying out for the team to play the Old Boys at `Streamers'. A variation on the Eton Wall Game played in a fast-flowing stream with a square ball, a set of rugby posts and a target tree stump, this bruisingly boisterous pursuit is the pride and joy of the games master, Huggins (Joshua McGuire), who is so aghast when Amberson prevents star player Henry Winchester (Jonah Hauer-King) from scoring a point (by blocking a shot at the stump while retrieving his asthma inhaler) that he puts him on half rations and condemns him to a pyjama-clad cross-country jaunt to fetch a pail of water from a pump on the school perimeter, known as a `bucket run'.

Taking a tumble on his way back, Amberson makes the acquaintance of Agnes (Pauline Etienne), the daughter of the new French master, Babinot (Denis Ménochet), a pulp novelist whose wife has just left him and who needs a revenue stream while he works on his next tome. But, while he is instantly smitten, Agnes only has eyes for Winchester, whom she sees hesitatingly reciting poetry in her father's class, at the prompting of Amberson, who hopes to attain a little reflected popularity by being at Winchester's beck and call. Thus, when Agnes asks him to deliver a parcel to Winchester and it contains a video message (that mashes up Bob Dylan's placard shtick to `Subterranean Homesick Blues' and Plastic Bertrand's `Ça Plane Pour Moi'), Amberson offers to help him reply in return for a dialling down of his bullying. 

Rescued from doing mid-stream sit-ups, Amberson guides Winchester though a video response edited to Dr Feelgood's `Riot in Cell Block No.9' and discovers that his tormentor has no experience of talking to girls whatsoever. Not that he's an expert himself and he falls from the window ledge of the cottage in the grounds when Babinot bursts into Agnes's bedroom while Amberson is delivering the tape. But he gets to peer in through the window and watch her enjoying his handiwork and remains content to be the go-between if it means spending time with the bashful lovebirds. Moreover, having impersonated Winchester over the phone to thanks Agnes for a cake she has baked, Amberson gets to direct the doltish jock in a video filmed in the cricket pavilion (with the school brass band playing Richard Strauss's `Also Sprach Zarathustra') to show how he intends fulfilling her hope he will take her to the moon. 

However, Winchester is nettled when Amberson criticises his performance (which is more slapstick than romantic) and suggests he is little more than `a labrador in trousers'. So, he dons his cricket whites, straps on his guitar and serenades Agnes from beneath her bedroom window with a ditty about the `umpire of love'. He is nonplussed when she admits to knowing nothing about cricket and allows Amberson to pose him in a projected moonscape that prompts Agnes to invite Winchester to shin up the drainpipe and kiss her. Unfortunately, Huggins is out walking his dog and he accuses Winchester of being a peeping tom. But he refuses to squeal on Winchester when Babinot drags him before the Head Man (Nicholas Rowe) and not even the threat of expulsion can sway him. 

Winchester and his clique are suitably impressed by Amberson's loyalty and they include him in the Streamers team for Founder's Day. However, Winchester is reluctant to throw away his future on a flirtation and asks Amberson to let Agnes down gently. But, instead of ending things, Amberson takes them to a new level by writing billet doux and encouraging Agnes to follow her dream of becoming a stage designer in Berlin. As the Head Man has ordered Babinot to move to a nearby housing estate to remove temptation from the boys, they leave notes in a fence at the school rifle range and, when Agnes catches Amberson making a drop, she coaxes him into accompanying her to the local pub, where they chat about first kisses and indulge in a spot of people watching before holding hands while riding on the pillion seat with a couple of elderly bikers. 

She still thinks that Winchester is the author of the notes, however, and sneaks into the school during a screening of The Dam Busters (1955) to ask him to meet her at the Norfolk Arms before she runs away to Germany. Amberson overhears the conversation and, after Winchester informs him during a floodlit roll call in the quad that he has no intention of keeping the assignation, he flits away to declare his feelings. Unfortunately, Huggins (who lives opposite the Babinots) sees her leave and alerts to the school to the rendezvous and Winchester cycles into town to create a diversion so that Amberson can say his piece. However, he succeeds only in crashing the Head Man's car and Amberson realises that Agnes has interpreted his folly as a romantic gesture and skulks back to his dorm before anyone notices he's gone. 

While Agnes departs for Berlin, Amberson comes to offer his condolences to Winchester, who has been expelled. He has no idea how he will fare in the big bad world and looks very vulnerable as he questions his `Mighty Winch' credentials. But he urges Amberson to tell Agnes the truth and he makes a mad taxi dash to the ferry port to get his first slapped face and his first kiss before returning to Caldermount to toss away the chance to become a Streamers hero in order to be true to himself. As the film ends, he tells his father that he is going to go his own way from now on and a closing montage shows the flipbook drawings Amberson has been creating throughout the story become increasingly sophisticated pieces of animation, as he starts to achieve his goals. 

This charming ending sums up the appeal of this enjoyable wallow in schoolboy nostalgia. MacDonald and his writers are well aware of the problems with public school life, but they resist the temptation to hammer them home and, as a result, their criticism is all the more deftly effective, especially where Winchester's fate is concerned, as a potential casualty in the military skirmishes that will occur over the ensuing decades. They do plump for happier endings for Amberson and Agnes, however, even though they fail to establish the extent of the struggle the latter endures with her caricatured Gallic father and provide too little domestic context for the former's rebellion against his own parent to feel anything more than a tokenistic afterthought. 

Nevertheless, Alex Lawther and Jonah Hauer-King are admirable, with Lawther giving a much more relaxed performance than he was required to give in Trudie Styler's exhausting school saga, Freak Show (2017). The Eton and Cambridge-educated Hauer-King also steps up from his last showing in Steve McLean's Postcards From London (2018), as he captures the complacency that can fool a big man on campus into believing life will always be a cakewalk. Pauline Etienne finds it harder to register as the sketchily limned dream girl, while Denis Ménochet and Nicholas Rowe have to make do with a couple of choice speeches. 

But the biggest disappointment is the waste of Joshua McGuire's socially gauche games master, who hilariously rides up in full uniform in a miniature tank to reprimand Amberson for getting caught up in a woodland corps exercise. An old boy whose Caldermount experience has prepared him for nothing more than bachelorhood and maintaining the college's preposterous rituals and regulations, Huggins feels like a Tom Sharpe character who has strayed into Marek Kanievska's Another Country (1984). Just as that film made evocative use of Brasenose College and the Bodleian Library for its setting, so cinematographer Nanu Segal and production designer Max Bellhouse exploit to full advantage the distinctive features of Lancing College and the glorious Sussex countryside that surrounds it. Indeed, Toby MacDonald can be justifiably proud of a lightweight, but genial debut that provokes plenty of gentle smiles while skewering the odd cloistered myth.