Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/858250
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 6 AUGUST 2017 22 Opinion I haven't got round to watching 'Dunkirk ' yet. But already I feel I know a lot about the movie just from all the online criticism it's been receiving. I know, for instance, that it doesn't have enough women in leading roles. Or black people. Or Indians (as in, people from India, not Native Americans... though of course, those are under-represented too). Apparently there are not enough Australians and New Zealanders, either. And no transsexuals at all, or any other subcategory of the LGTBQi community. It seems, in brief, that there is hardly a single minority or majority group in the entire world that doesn't somehow feel left out of Christopher Nolan's latest film. I'm half waiting for Bridget Bardot to complain about the lack of endangered species of wildlife, or anything resembling a concern for animal rights. It's almost as though there is a checklist of themes and gender/ethnicity balances that must be somehow incorporated into each and every single contemporary film... regardless what that film is actually about. In this case, it's about an operation to evacuate Allied Forces from Nazi-occupied France in WW2. I'll leave it historians to argue over how many women, black people, Indians and all the rest were actually involved, and in what capacity. What intrigues me about all this criticism is that, from the very outset, none of it is actually concerned with the film itself. Hardly any of the negative reviews I've read took the trouble to analyse the details that Nolan actually included in his historical re-enactment. They focused instead on all the things an imaginary film by the same name might have featured, had it been directed by someone else. Such arguments are not, therefore, about the 'film Christopher Nolan made'; they're about the film he SHOULD HAVE made... according to an entirely arbitrary (and quite frankly irrelevant) set of criteria, drawn up by people who have never made any films at all. Naturally, this sort of approach is not limited to 'Dunkirk '; nor even to the movies. It seems we have inadvertently stumbled into an era where what matters is not the art or literature you actually produce; it's how much your art panders to (often blatantly unrealistic) audience expectations... how many of the boxes you manage to tick off on that imaginary checklist. And in some cases, it applies even to the art or literature you intend to produce, but haven't yet got round to producing. Not only is it possible – as so many have done with Dunkirk – to criticise a movie without having seen it... but it's become possible to pre- emptively criticise a movie before production on it has even begun. This is what's happening right now, in the case of the winner of a newly-launched local movie fund. No sooner was it announced that a local film company was awarded 100,000 to make a biopic of Carmelo Borg Pisani – the Raphael Vassallo Requiem for an unmade movie Personally, I think the Borg Pisani story is not only a very good choice of movie subject but an important one to evaluate through the medium of a Maltese-made film In full fascist glory: Borg Pisani dons his unfirom with colleagues (Borgt Pisani can be seen on the right of the group below looking to the left).