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| Daisy and Edmund smoulder in a field |
I'm not entirely sure what Kevin Macdonald thought he was trying to do. From the start it's crying out to be an average bildungsroman along the lines of It's Kind of a Funny Story, Submarine or The Perks of Being a Wallflower, but not as good as any of them. Troubled teen (in this case Miss Ronan as Daisy) is healed by the awesome power of love. Everyone leaves the cinema beaming ear to ear with a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. But then a nuclear bomb goes off and everyone dies.
Even more disturbingly, I wasn't convinced by Saoirse Ronan's performance, despite liking her new hair-do. It was like she was trying really hard not to be Saoirse Ronan, in order to be American and nasty (which is sort of the point of acting, but stick with me). And every so often, when she wasn't being nasty, a familiar Saoirse Ronan expression would creep out, to remind us that she was indeed a loveable Irish girl at heart rather than a scary American teen. She does do a great variety of characters, but she seems better at the sympathetic ones; I wasn't entirely sold with Hanna either at times. But maybe that's just me.
Anyway, as I was saying, it's all very strange. We go from uber-pastoral idyllic farm where people make love in hay lofts, and Ronan falls for a swain with floppy hair and an eagle (Edmund). But juxtaposed against this Edenic picture of Britain, the capital is blown to smithereens, and some nasty terrorists do nasty things. Ronan becomes a 21st Century Land Girl, and encouraged by odd visions of her and her paramour running naked through a forest, goes hiking in an attempt to get back to the farmhouse, naively believing that by doing so everything can go back to normal.
What is the film trying to say? To start off with it all seems to be about living a little and disregarding
reservations and rules. "All those voices in your head," opines Edmund mysteriously, as if he too can hear Daisy's badly managed voice over which attempts to convince the audience that she's a bit OCD. But then when the Government makes the (quite reasonable) request that everyone has to do something for the war effort, they all start kicking and screaming. Is this meant to show that we're all feckless and selfish compared to our 1914 or 1939 counterparts, or are we meant to sympathise? Surely a bit of farming is more productive than going on a long walk. And then all the woes that meet Daisy and her cousin as they try and get home are from unpleasant people taking advantage of the chaos and lack of order to do unpleasant things. So surely rules are a good thing. And what's the take home message about Britain? Is it closer to pastoral idyll or the world one step away from disintegration and anarchy? And is all this confusion or ambiguity?
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| Daisy hopes the soldiers will let her go by pulling a funny face |
Either way, I quite enjoyed How I Live Now. By the end of it, Ronan had won me over as Daisy and the ending was nowhere near as twee as I imagined it would be. If the intended audience were younger teenagers, I'm not entirely sure how they would have received the images of massacred children or women being dragged off to be raped. But ho hum. It's cleverly directed too and very well shot, and it's got a new song from Natasha Khan (Bat For Lashes) and a remix of a Daughter B-Side so the music's not half bad. Therefore, if like me you are a Saoirse Ronan lover (and how could you not be), then whilst this is not up there with the lofty heights of Atonement, The Lovely Bones and Byzantium, it's definitely better than Hanna.
