Éloge de l'amour: "Amélie" at 25

Amélie - ageless Amélie - is 25 this year, which means we've all had ample time to work out where we stand on it. Is this, as Xan Brooks argued earlier this week in The Independent, mere moodboard cinema, with a cloyingly cutesy-poo heroine who embodies all the worst aspects of the 21st century's main character syndrome? (Even if, granted, she is the main character of a film called, you know, Amélie.) Is it still, as many believed at the time, a defining modern date movie? This is an unfashionable confession, but I too had previously found Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film affecting up to a point. Beneath its sugarcoated crème brûlée toplayer, its garrulous array of kooks and quirks and talking inanimate objects, it always struck me as a rare romcom with some understanding of solitude. There are moments during that melancholy stretch in the middle - governed above all else by the sad pools of Audrey Tautou's eyes and Yann Tiersen's immediately evocative piano-and-accordion score, very much the Buena Vista Social Club sound of autumn 2001 - when Jeunet allows us to sit quietly with its heroine's (sometimes self-imposed) loneliness; a creative choice that makes it all the more lovely and moving when she does finally find someone (and someone who might actually be right for her, given his comparably curious habits). Rewatching the film again this week, I was most struck by the solitude of those around her. The denizens of the Deux Moulins cafe, walled off in separate booths, separate lives; the woman in the fake Renoir painting; the neighbours, in their own little boxes; Lady Di, killed in the pursuit of true love. All the lonely people. Where do they all come from?

It's something of a miracle that we ever notice their plight(s). Jeunet had dropped his old partner-in-crime Marc Caro some years before, yet he'd retained the insistent busyness and eccentric character playing of the pair's breakthroughs Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. Though Amélie would prove more overtly crowdpleasing, there is still a lot of clutter around the film's heart. (Much more than I remember there being, in fact.) Yet in certain moments, Jeunet still had the energy to clear the table of childish things and flirt with something tragically real: the fear of growing old alone, of dying without having known love. That's... well, that's more than we were offered in the same year's more generously reviewed Bridget Jones's Diary, which introduced a very different romantic heroine, and played out her travails as winking, cringe-inducing farce. Jeunet has Paris in the summertime, a yen to make cinema rather than Bridget's television, and Tautou, the actress as petting-zoo creature: doe-eyed yet oddly bovine in her responses, as if she were just about the last person on set to realise what Jeunet was getting at here. We can surely agree it's an acquired taste: this review may be as close as I'm going to get to responding in any favourable way to Wes Anderson's recent doodles. And it's as simplistic in its worldview as anything made in Paris with Raimu seventy years before, rewarding our gal's virtue while punishing the grocer's brutish sins. More than most recent anniversary reissues, Amélie does now seem a relic of an older world, and not just because it opened mere days or weeks before 9/11. Jeunet made one further attempt at a grand cinematic statement - with 2005's sputtering period romance A Very Long Engagement, again with Tautou - before beating a total retreat into trivia. This time round, I came to look upon his best-known film with the residual fondness one feels for an old flame, while also wondering why I fell so hard for it in the first place, and feeling a pang of nostalgia for the days when a French romcom could become not just a hit but a pop-cultural totem - a film that inspired such passions you had to take sides on it. Where have they gone?

Amélie returns to selected cinemas from tomorrow.

On demand: "The Witches"

The family sector had grown so unignorably vast by the end of the 1980s that even Nicolas Roeg - the visionary behind the altogether adult Don't Look Now, Bad Timing, Eureka and Insignificance - was tempted by the offer of a fat Warner Bros. payday. 1990's The Witches, from more or less the same moment as Tim Burton's Batman, at least saw its maker drawn towards a darker hued bedtime story in the form of the Roald Dahl perennial about a global network of witches working overtime to kill children. The adaptation was by Don't Look Now scribe Allan Scott; the results were not exactly A Minecraft Movie. Roeg, for one, took the opportunity to lean back into the Gothic, much as he had in his early days as a cinematographer on Roger Corman's Poe films. After a prologue of ominous warnings passed on by kindly grandma Mia Zetterling to her now American grandson Luke (Jasen Fisher, so expressive Spielberg pinched him for his subsequent Hook), everybody decamps to the Hotel Excelsior, a seafront art deco hostelry run by Rowan Atkinson's hapless manager Mr. Stringer; there, granny and Luke's fellow travellers include the patrons of a conference staged by the so-called Royal Society for the Protection of Children, where keynote speaker Anjelica Huston proposes the mass extermination of all kiddiwinks in a thick Germanic accent. The ambience is not unlike that of any Tory party conference of the 1980s - Mrs. T would have found herself right at home amid the curling cucumber sandwiches - but you can tell this was a production with American money to spend from its disproportionately spacious idea of coastal British hotel rooms.

For a while, you could be forgiven for thinking Roeg has simply bedded down in these environs to gaze, with much the same mix of awe and fear displayed by young Luke, upon large groups of witchy and bewitching women. Huston wafts into shot, peers disdainfully at the British character actors wibbling and bibbling several feet beneath her (primetime favourites one and all: Atkinson, Bill Paterson, Brenda Blethyn, Jane Horrocks, Jim Carter) and clinches the Morticia gig in the following year's The Addams Family, if she hadn't already. (She also, in passing, peels off her own scalp with a flourish, a sequence pushing at the upper limits of the PG certificate.) As Dahl's byzantine narrative unfolds, however, one starts to wonder whether Roeg the visionary was drawn this way by the prospect of a hero who spends much of the film transformed into a talking mouse, and whether The Witches had any influence on another visionary, George Miller, determining to adapt Dick King-Smith's The Sheep-Pig as Babe a few years later. Though initially a little clunky and rough-hewn in comparison with the matinee delights that followed it, this Witches soon starts to beguile: anecdotal evidence would suggest kids everywhere continue to thrill to the mouse (and mouse-eye) photography, while accompanying adults can savour Roeg's slyer allusions to the idea this hotel isn't as above board as it first seems, not least Stanley Myers' score, with its pronounced echoes of The Shining. Remade - or, rather, retold - by Robert Zemeckis, an Eighties graduate with no particular flair for the Gothic, in 2020; I haven't seen the official statistics, but I should imagine its predecessor scared an entire generation out of accepting sweets from strangers.

The Witches is currently streaming via HBO Max and NOW, available to rent via Prime Video, and on DVD via Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.

The cruelty is the point: "Dhurandhar: The Revenge"

Last December's Dhurandhar was three-and-a-half hours of artful India First propaganda, propulsive enough on a scene-by-scene basis to sweep up not just the usual Friday and Saturday night crowds but sage and more seasoned observers besides; the result was the first truly global right-wing megahit since Mel Gibson's comparably bloody The Passion of the Christ in 2004. (Melania wishes her documentary had done similar numbers, but she'd have had to stick a sharpened stiletto through somebody's skull to compete.) The story's grand finale, Dhurandhar: The Revenge, runs a full four hours, making it officially the eighth longest Indian film of all time: I don't know whether final cut was locked before the first film sold the tickets it did, but it has the air of one of those YouTube channels that have realised there's money in platforming more sustained bursts of hate speech. The first movie ended with Ranveer Singh's luxuriantly locked Indian superspy (operating under the codename Hamza Ali Mazari) completing the first stage of his mission in a cesspool-snakepit Pakistan, namely infiltrating the Karachi underworld that has reportedly been facilitating cross-border terror attacks. The sequel opens with a prologue that affords our hero a mid-mission makeover and wardrobe change. Reintroduced sporting a rugby shirt and a neat short-back-and-sides, the younger Hamza - here referred to by his birthname Jaskirat - is the image of the upright college boy you could take home to mother. Until, that is, he's compelled to launch a one-man assault on the safe house where a trafficker is holding his sister captive, provoking a riot of graphic impalements and roiling hatchet attacks, carnage topped only when Jaskirat shoots one foe in the groin at such an angle that the bullet erupts out of his face. A gentle welcome back, then, to whatever the hell this aggrieved diptych is and means to be.

It's never a good idea for a critic to try and pin down a director's morality from their output, but Dhurandhar 2: The Deadening is the first movie I've seen for many years with long stretches that appear governed by a truly sociopathic sensibility. Fine, so to protect India, Hamza has to blow some bad guys away, and sure, so now we learn this man's doing what he's gotta do to protect India's wives and daughters, forever in peril from nefarious Muslims. (Hamza's own child bride (Sara Arjun) gains a kid in this sequel, but otherwise has nothing to do - and little to say for herself - until being called up for damsel-in-distress duty in the final hour. This, too, is a form of national service.) But writer-director Aditya Dhar - possessed of the online edgelord's need to push ever further, towards vicious extremes - wants us to see and cheer each snap of the neck, every limb torn from limb; he wants a standing ovation when Hamza forces his pistol into an opponent's occluded eye socket. There is zero distance between the direction and these characters; there is, instead, an absolute, in places borderline crazed commitment to the same murderous cause. It's a good job Dhar's only holding a camera, because God knows the damage he'd do with an actual weapon. The Revenge explained to me why even this filmmaker's most starry-eyed defenders have sounded so vague and dazed in their descriptions of what in these films has worked for them; in leaning so far into this blunt-force cinema, they too have been smacked upside the head. (They weren't compelled so much as concussed.) In this world, even Jaskirat's closest childhood friend winds up with a syringe in the eyeball and a bathtub to the back of the neck (yay?); Dhar drafts in his wife Yami Gautam Dhar for a one-scene second-half cameo as a medical angel of death, which seems a deeply morbid way for a conservative to keep things in the family. Either way, the casual Islamophobia of the first movie is here overwritten by a more generalised contempt, for humanity in toto. I had to laugh when Hamza removed the toxin-laced sticking plaster he so carefully applied ahead of a (failed) assassination attempt, and promptly tossed it from a moving car's window: sure, that won't do any harm on the streets. Life is cheap here; movies are long; and sacrifice is both paramount and inevitable.

It turns out Dhurandhar needs its violence, firstly because it presents as the only way for Dhar to resolve his exhaustingly tangled plot, cursed with a thousand and one shady types, few of whom we're given cause to know or care about before they get eviscerated. The Revenge charts the fallout, both gangland and political, from the events of film one, and the more bodies that hit the floor - whether shot, stabbed or dropped from a high building - the fewer men there are left standing. Dhar affords himself some variation in his kill scenes: a certain seriousness when it comes to state-sanctioned murder, and a glibber, quack-quack-oops comedy elsewhere. The violence is the constant; death is all these films have got. Granted, The Revenge piles up more deaths and more spectacular deaths. Arjun Rampal's beardy big bad has his ankle flayed off before the rest of him is redeployed as a human stopper in a kerosene tank: bad idea, kablooey. (In 4DX, you get to pick pieces of him out of your popcorn.) But behind it all sits a rank and festering nihilism: it's India or nothing. Were there not a gang war kicking off or a knife fight in the works, Dhurandhar would consist solely of scenes of varyingly doughy middle-aged men sitting around and making threats or deals. Maybe that's the India the BJP want, but it hardly makes for good cinema. Dhar lost something when he killed off Akshaye Khanna, with his sleek, economical style of villainy, at the end of film one; now we're left with a crotch-grabbing Sanjay Dutt, always a much cruder performer in a flagwaving context. The material is no good for Ranveer, either: one of India's great contemporary stars now has to try and balance the equation of having his biggest commercial hits with two of the most worthless films he will ever make. Not every role Singh takes has to be a Rocky Randhawa, of course, but The Revenge forces him into alternately glowering and bellowing; with his charm buried beneath a wig that reminded me of the Rock Profile idea of Barry Gibb from the Bee Gees, he's just a numbed face splattered in his victims' blood. Hamza is permitted just one (understandable) smile in these four hours, upon returning to that all-singing, all-dancing terrorist training camp - emphasis on camp - that we glimpsed midway through film one, where potential mujahideen are drilled along the lines of Rockettes with rockets. (I can see the reviews now: Five stars! Commit atrocities for a ticket!) 

So where does all this carnage leave us, and where does it leave the Hindi mainstream? After a decade or so in which Bollywood has struggled to define itself anew - the old stars wheezily receding from sight along with their hairlines, the old commercial formulas not quite delivering as they once did, streaming media and Southern industries with better ideas manoeuvring past the lumbering Bombay machine on the outside - the past twelve months do look to have opened up two viable if diverging paths: the timeless, youth-skewing love story (as represented by last summer's smash Saiyaara) and the frothing, male-oriented fury Dhar's one-two has brought to the table, which - like it or not - does seem very now. Given the money the two Dhurandhars have thus far raked in between them - and it surprises me that the series' ardent-to-rabid fans haven't thought to knock up a website showing the gross spiralling upwards by the second, like the figures on a Wall Street ticker - I suspect this will now be the road more travelled by producers; Indian cinemagoers have voted decisively with their backsides, even if they're backing themselves and their cinema into an obvious dead end. (To paraphrase the poets of dystopia: you do it to yourselves, you do, and that's why it really hurts.) The Dhurandhars are so clearly the kind of runaway hit that - much as the appearance of Punxsutawney Phil's shadow in Groundhog Day predicts heavy weather - all but guarantees another decade of truly rotten cinema, of imitations and knock-offs bound to the same punitive length and cruelty, yet made by less skilful creatives with lesser players and lesser songs. In a fully functioning cinema ecosystem, dumbass action movies like these wouldn't be seized upon as state-of-the-nation texts. Yet the Dhurandhar project probably is reflective of where India's head - and its soul - is at as 2026 starts in earnest, with its politicos cheerleading for Israel's ever-mounting outrages while waging wars on their own minorities at home. That doesn't make these films' wild success any less depressing, whether sat through in person or considered in hindsight. One perverse positive, which is really the least Dhar could do for us: after enduring seven gruelling hours of this, Gibson's Passion of the Christ sequel is likely to seem like What Women Want.

Dhurandhar: The Revenge is now showing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Transhood"

Transhood is a real journey, in just 93 minutes. As per that title, the approach this HBO doc takes is not unlike that taken by Richard Linklater in his Boyhood: documentarist Sharon Liese follows four young transitioning Americans and their families as they navigate the middle part of the 2010s. We begin in 2014: the year Linklater's film opened, but also the final sandgrains of Obamatime, when transness was altogether less contentious. We end five years later with a new President installed and taking a particular delight in waging war on the trans community. The film's subjects are seen to grow, change, adapt; around them, however, America - itself caught in a transitional moment - is devolving, becoming set in its ways and only more hardened. For much of the running time, Liese observes the usual rituals of childhood and adolescence: birthday parties, doctor's appointments, crushes, first dates, family meals, trips to the barbershop, playdates, prom nights. Fifteen-year-old Leena - the furthest along this trajectory, but also sensitive enough to grasp what kind of a world she's entering into - has started to weigh up career options. Yet the film also captures what the majority of American kids don't and won't directly experience: puberty blockers, pronoun changes, transphobic bullying, bathroom nonsense, people with placards opposing your very existence, and an elevated level of background noise that cannot be good for one's headspace. The most complicated (and thereby compelling) story here is that of eight-year-old Avery, raised by erstwhile Southern Baptists to become, among things, National Geographic's postergirl for all things gender, a position that leaves her horribly exposed as a lightning rod for online abuse.

For the most part, Transhood bears witness to the secret resilience of kids: Liese's subjects are often observed bouncing around, forever in youthful motion, oblivious to some (if not all) of that aforementioned noise. If anything, it's arguably the parents who bear the blunt of the worry, seen trying to obtain expensive medical treatments within a non-socialised healthcare system (a palpable emotional bind: they want to give their children the best shot at happiness, but struggle to afford it), recognising they've been prioritising one of their children over others with needs of their own, or juggling intervening on their trans kid's behalf with stepping back to let their offspring stand on their own two feet. You soon realise these parents must have been carefully selected at an early stage in the project. They're not obvious flowers-in-hair, hippy-dippy bohemians, rather working moms and pops, often from flyover states, who nevertheless have some idea of the issues in play and the best language to use. (Though unspoken, the editorial insinuation is clear: if these non-New Yorker subscribers can do it, why can't more Americans?) Elsewhere, an intriguing push-me-pull-you tension is visible in Liese's filmmaking: she wants to position these kids as extraordinary case studies, as brave and beautiful as they are, but she also wants to show them living ordinary lives - or at least lives that would be blissfully ordinary were it not for Trump, bathroom bans and transphobic hate attacks. The filmmaker's fix is a simple, effective one: she hangs back, watches, listens and learns, and wherever possible does her utmost to let her subjects be. The simplest story here would appear that of four-year-old Phoenix, a biologically male four-year-old - too young for puberty blockers - who's taken to wearing dresses and feather boas as countless cis kids (and the young protagonist of the French feature Ma vie en rose) have. Yet Phoenix starts dressing (and identifying) as a boy again in the wake of the Trump inauguration and his parents' divorce. Maybe Phoenix will grow up to be trans, gay or gender-queer; maybe he won't. The film's stance is firmly and that's OK: no harm, no foul, and either way his parents still dote on him. Sometimes you have to give people time and space to reveal themselves, on their own terms; sometimes a documentary's line of approach is as instructive - you'd hope as teachable - as anything its subjects say or do.

Transhood is now streaming via HBO Max and NOW.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of March 20-22, 2026):

1 (new) Project Hail Mary (12A) ***

2 (new) Dhurandhar: The Revenge (18) **

3 (1) Hoppers (U) ****

4 (2) Reminders of Him (PG)

5 (new) Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (15)

6 (new) Aadu 3 (12A)

7 (3) How to Make a Killing (12A)

8 (4) Mother's Pride (12A) **

9 (6) Scream 7 (18)

10 (new) The Good Boy (15) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. The Killer

2. Orwell: 2+2=5

3. Romeo + Juliet [above]

4. Moulin Rouge!

5. The Good Boy

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (5) Sinners (15) ****

2 (2) Wicked: For Good (PG)

3 (17) One Battle After Another (15) ****

4 (14) Dune: Part One (12) **

5 (3) Shelter (15)

6 (29) Spider-Man: No Way Home (12) ***

7 (2) Zootropolis 2 (PG) ***

8 (20) Weapons (15) ***

9 (26) Hamnet (12) **

10 (18) The Super Mario Bros Movie (PG)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Saipan

2. Sisu: Road to Revenge

3. Good Boy

4. The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants

5. Zootropolis 2

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Toy Story 2 (Sunday, Channel 4, 5.50pm)

2. The Sound of Music (Good Friday, BBC One, 2.30pm)

3. The Ten Commandments (Sunday, five, 11.40am)

4. The Prestige (Monday, BBC Two, 11pm)

5. Good Vibrations (Sunday, BBC Two, 12.05am)

Curious George: "Orwell: 2+2=5"

In an era of blandly streaming hagiography, the veteran Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck has developed the distinguishing skill of using noted lives and known properties as a platform for addressing bigger, more pressing issues. 2017's I Am Not Your Negro stitched James Baldwin's words and public appearances into an engrossing, provocative disquisition on race in America; his brilliant 2021 series for HBO, Exterminate All the Brutes, reordered the history books and emerged with a jolting exposé of the colonialist mindset. On one level, Peck's new project Orwell: 2+2=5 is telling a very specific story: that of George Orwell, heading to the Scottish island of Jura in 1948, after the death of his wife, to recover from a recent brush with tuberculosis and begin work on the novel that was to become Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet Peck - restless, curious, adventurous, mischievous - isn't content to leave it at that. You get the feeling this is something different - something radical, indeed - from this patchwork film's first ten minutes. We get clips of TV movie retellings of Orwell's life (expected) and film adaptations of his work (very expected), but also from Lean's Oliver Twist (less so); while newsreel footage of the bombing of Berlin in 1945 (expected) is juxtaposed with the siege of Mariupol, police raids in Burma, the hangings undertaken by the Nazis in Sergei Loznitza's 2021 doc Babi Yar. Context, and the noose some doofus wielded amid the January 6 riots. It's headscrambling at first, but a unifying idea soon becomes apparent: 1948 equals 1984 equals 2026. To that old canard it couldn't happen here, Peck - via Orwell - retorts it already has, and likely will again, if we're not careful. This is not, as it turns out, solely a film about Orwell, but a film on the themes (or a film extending the themes) Orwell was putting into play.

Biographically, Peck frames his subject as an inside man, a well-bred whistleblower. Born into what the writer specified as the "lower-upper middle class", Orwell was shuttled off to Eton in his youth before joining the police force in colonial Burma. As Peck sees it - and Orwell, in his personal notes, recognised - this background left him uniquely positioned to expose the mechanisms of power whereby lies become truth, war peace, ignorance strength, slavery freedom. Peck has possibly been encouraged by producer Alex Gibney to cover this ground from multiple angles, clutching (and combining) disparate sources. In a sequence on bookburning, Peck crosscuts footage from Nazi Germany, recent US book bans, the Ramin Bahrani-directed remake of Fahrenheit 451 and some extraordinary footage of an IDF soldier torching a library in Gaza. One thing you probably weren't expecting to see in a documentary about George Orwell: a clip from 2023's M3GAN, used to illustrate both the threat posed by AI and the writer's dire warnings about mass surveillance. Big Brother continues to watch us all, even if his aim is to convert our words and likeness into deindividualised, saleable slop. I sensed Peck was really onto something when he cut in a lengthy extract from the still-contentious collectivism debate at the centre of Ken Loach's Land and Freedom - but then, this is a film of ideas rather than mere textbook or shrine: Peck clearly regards Nineteen Eighty-Four as a springboard or open-ended text, an ongoing warning from history. The ideas thrown loose by all this montage are chewy, jolting, provocative, as they were when Orwell first set them on the page; in Peck's hands, they also become an argument for reading and viewing widely and critically. (Not least because they propose a corrective to the narrow-minded monocultures that nurture and prop up fascism.) I understand where those who've found the film scattershot are coming from: Orwell himself gets a little lost in the mix, though in Damian Lewis's reading, he presents as far funnier than expected. (On Sartre: "He is a bag of wind.") Orwell: 2+2=5 is what happens when an estate affords a filmmaker free hand to run with an author's ideas; rather than a supplicant creative paying mealymouthed tribute to a great, active mind, it finds a great, active mind meeting a great, active mind head on so as to thrash something out and create a multiplication of meanings. The result, well worth grappling with, is at once a superlative feat of editing, the film equivalent of Orwell's goal "to write in plain, vigorous language", and a weapon to be wielded against the worst aspects of the modern world. Arm yourself.

Orwell: 2+2=5 opens today in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Saipan"

The directorial pairing of Lisa Barros D'Sa and Glenn Leyburn continue their useful project of revisiting leftfield but revealing moments in recent Irish history. After breaking through with 2012's Good Vibrations, their film on Terri Hooley and the Troubles, the pair's latest heads south of the border to dramatise a very different shade of Celtic strife. Saipan concerns the conflict that gripped the nation - and, indeed, no small part of the wider footballing world - in the run-up to the 2002 World Cup: the increasingly noisy discord that broke out between then Republic of Ireland boss Mick McCarthy and the team's captain and star player Roy Keane. A prologue sets the scene - covering the Republic's scrappy progress to the finals via a play-off against Iran, with an agonised Keane watching on from home, injured - before it's seconds out for a surprisingly heavyhitting clash of personalities and leadership styles. This McCarthy (Steve Coogan) is a clubbably bluff relic of the old up-and-under, run-it-off, kick-it-into-Row-Z 20th century game, worshipping at the altar of his erstwhile Republic manager "Big" Jack Charlton. (Like McCarthy, Charlton was himself an Englishman, and the film invites us to wonder whether or not that very Englishness is at least partially responsible for getting Keane's goat so.) Keane (Éanna Hardwicke) is the hotheaded visionary of the game to come (a vision he may have first witnessed on the mainland in his time at the all-conquering Manchester United): professional, driven, determined to seize this moment to win, not just to enjoy a kickaround and a few weeks off. Their rumbles and grumbles come to a head at a pre-tournament training camp on the titular Pacific isle - a key WW2 location - which proves a notable shambles. No footballs were available to train with for the first few days, while the local goats had colonised a pitch that was more rocks than grass, leading FAI officials to distract the players with offers of beer and banana boats. What washes up on these shores is, in short, a perfect storm: while the backdrop inevitably recalls the moneyed farawaylands of TV's The White Lotus, this Keane and this McCarthy begin to eye one another up like Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune in Hell in the Pacific.

The script is by Paul Fraser, who wrote several of Shane Meadows' early features (TwentyFourSeven, A Room for Romeo Brass, Dead Man's Shoes). Fraser's trick here is to feint as if he's merely writing up footballing gossip, but then go another way and write - as he did in those first, breakthrough scripts - about men, and a certain type of man in particular. The movie's Keane and McCarthy aren't toxic in the 21st century sense of the word, but they are tough and tricky nevertheless: hung up on an idea of strength, hotwired to butt heads, pick sides, hold grudges, they're actually fairly similar in some respects, not least in their altogether aggravating refusal to back down and concede a point. (As McCarthy observes of Keane: "What makes him a great player on the pitch makes him a pain in the arse off it.") Early scenes featuring the men's wives (Alice Lowe and Harriet Cains) serve to flag how difficult championship-winning egos like these must be to have to live with - but also the advantages of having the husband-and-wife team who previously made 2019's very touching Ordinary Love behind the camera. Throughout this roiling back-and-forth, Barros D'Sa and Leyburn demonstrate a sharp shared eye for what might be missing and what might better balance this picture out; around Keane and McCarthy's more intense interactions, they wisely pull back a little, allowing us the distance and perspective their petty squabbler antagonists - locked up together in a hotel that may as well be a prison camp - rarely allow themselves. Just on the fringes of Saipan, in the judicious use of archive news clips and vox pops, we also begin to see a film about Ireland itself, found here with one foot in the past and one foot in the here-and-now, with money in its pockets - a result of the fabled Tiger economy - but differing ideas on how best to spend it. Piss it away overnight on leisure and chasing the craic, as World Cups permit, or play the far smarter game and invest in longer-term advancement?

The abstemious Keane, the moderniser in the camp, represents self-determination: weigh his subsequent, stellar career as a TV analyst against the diminishing returns of the McCarthy managerial career, and damn it if he wasn't right nine times out of ten, but - fuck me - is he abrasive about it, flying into even minor misunderstandings with the verbal equivalent of a two-footed challenge. And yet impatience is the moderniser's curse: Fraser gives him a very modern, very relatable anger at the institution (the Irish FA, in this case), and the failure of his appointed caregivers to provide the appropriate level of care. (Cruelly so, during the perceived slight Keane unearths from wounded memory late on.) Here, then, are a pair who might equally have sustained a compelling stage two-hander: the Republic's own Marat and Sade or Danton and Robespierre or Clough and Revie. Coogan obviously has form when it comes to throwback roles: he makes his McCarthy identifiably a "gaffer" rather than one of these newfangled, designer-clad head coaches or directors of football, a weary old duffer whose primary concern in Saipan is what colour to paint his fenceposts back home. And though Hardwicke doesn't look much like Keane, he absolutely nails that electric combination of attitude, drive and prickliness one saw in the player's MOTD era. (Oddly, it's he who lands the film's most Partridgean moment: stomping away from one training session in his stockinged feet, clutching a lonely kitbag.) But Saipan is well cast all round, its supporting players pinning down the personalities of everyone from a pacifist Niall Quinn (Jack Hickey) to a young FAI lackey, visibly elated to be called upon by Keano. In its closing movement, Saipan assumes an unusual shape: the inevitable confrontation is followed by archival fallout that reveals the divisions within the Ireland of 2002 (were you Team Roy or Team Mick?), then a genuinely meaningful ending as both men rue what they've lost to the strains of the Walker Brothers' "No Regrets". (It won't just be Irish viewers who will want to bash their heads together, or at least give them a wobble.) I'm not Irish, but if I were, I think I'd be delighted that these two filmmakers were turning such a thoughtful and imaginative eye to our collective history - and in the modern game, Jeff, it takes real skill to get all of the above into a film that runs to exactly ninety minutes, plus stoppage time.

Saipan is now available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube, and on DVD and Blu-ray through Vertigo Releasing.