A Quiet Masterpiece — Dunkirk

A good place to start would be to ask — how does one make a war movie?

Perhaps you can throw gore and blood at your audience’s face. Fill the screen with the physical brutality of war — hacked limbs, bleeding torsos, faces smudged with smoke. Saving Private Ryan is one such movie.

Or maybe you can turn it into a character study. You can smuggle in questions of right and wrong along with the sound of bullets whizzing past. You can throw in conversations about just violence and unjust bloodshed next to landmines going off. American Sniper, and Brad Pitt’s Netflix movie, War Machine, fall in this category.

Or, perhaps, you can make a movie filled with an elaborate backstory — after all, wars don’t start on the battlefield but in closed rooms. Charlie Wilson’s War, written by Aaron Sorkin, is one such movie — it details the closed door negotiations and arduous consensus building that went into defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Dunkirk doesn’t fit any of these categories.

The dialogue is sparse. This is unlike Christopher Nolan’s other movies, which hinge on what people say and how that unravels. The Dark Knight — his best movie, if I were to judge — ricochets the drama to a boiling point by having the characters fire verbal volleys at each other.

Inception — the title I’d choose if there was only one movie I could bring to an island where I would be stranded forever — rests on the importance of the said, the unsaid, the dreamy abyss in-between. However, despite breaking ground with Nolan’s previous movies, Dunkirk floored me.

The characters in Dunkirk are boxed in a corner — both psychologically and geographically. Words can’t negotiate with bombs and bullets raining from the sky. Hence they quietly carry the injured, bury the dead, and look for stubs of half-burnt cigarettes in the abandoned homes in the town of Dunkirk. To even begin to put certain things in words sets off a process of loss — language is incapable of capturing the truly beautiful, or the truly terrifying.

Lack of dialogue, does not, however, mean lack of action. The movie has a lot of moving parts — fighter jets downing enemy planes into the ocean, British civilians sailing across the channel to rescue Allied soldiers, the stoic defiance of men on the beach which spills over, every now and then, to despair. These moving parts communicate—bodies out at sea, starved and thirsty, can convey the essential hell of their condition without having to say a word. And they do. To verbalize is to trivialize. Nolan sidesteps the trap.

Another curious thing about Dunkirk is the lack of women. This isn’t a reiteration of the feminist claim that Dunkirk is guilty of sidelining women in its narrative. Dunkirk is based on historical facts and should in no way have to compromise its integrity as a period film at the altar of screeching social justice warriors. However, I still find the lack of female characters interesting— from the perspective of Nolan’s filmography.

Nolan’s breakout movie was Memento — a story of a man seeking vengeance for his wife’s death. The Prestige, a favourite among a lot of Nolanites, stars two magicians — and both of their wives die in the movie. Inception has a protagonist with…a dead wife. In The Dark Knight, Rachel, Bruce Wayne’s love interest, dies. See the pattern yet? Nolan is a master at creating evocative female characters who meet tragic ends, and leave behind permanently scarred male protagonists. These protagonists, then, have each of their choices informed, and weighed down, by the tragedy that befell them. Hence, not only does Nolan create high-concept thrillers and dramas, he also constructs a doomed romance at the heart of most of his movies. When Interstellar came out, I hated it — other than the plot holes and the cringe-inducing Anne Hathaway speech about ‘love’, the movie was missing a femme fatale. Leading up to Dunkirk, I was nervous that a similar lack of a solid female character would leave a hole that no amount of male bonding will fill. Watching the movie, however, proved me wrong. Dunkirk doesn’t need romance, because it tells the story of the ultimate rendezvous with survival. And there is something inherently romantic about trying to survive. About being willing to fight again.

Further, this movie has no backstory. We know absolutely nothing about the past of these characters. Nolan is famous for his flashbacks — they feature prominently in every single movie he’s made. Except this. This departure from a signature Nolan style, however, failed to as much as register while I was watching the movie. Dunkirk does not require trite talk about idyllic farms back home. It does not need to show young wives awaiting their husbands. It needs no crutch to fall back upon. The immediacy of Van Hoytema’s cinematography amps up the present moment till it assumes an urgent, overwhelming importance. The shame of retreat, and the seduction of living to fight another day, compound to create a tapestry that is arresting and possesses dramatic weight.

Dunkirk is being hailed as the movie event of year — and I’m entirely behind the sentiment. Some reviewers are even calling it the best war movie ever made. However, I think it is more than that — it is a maestro’s triumphant return to form. Go watch it as soon as you can. And then go back again, as I did.

As I will.