Director – Jamie Flatters – 2024 – UK – Cert. 15 – 101m
* or *****, depending how I’m feeling at the time
A group of soldiers armed with sticks instead of guns fight a war against an unseen enemy on open ground near some woodlands – opens the Clapham International Film Festival which runs from Wednesday, November 27th to Saturday, November 30th.
With a title that sounds like a mis-pronounciation of ‘Soldiers’, Shoulders is a pretty strange experience. Photographed, ***** SPOILER ALERT ***** apart from a couple of shots in colour ***** SPOILER ALERT ENDS *****, in at once stark and ravishing black and white, it features a visually partially diverse cast some of whom are instantly recognisable and some of whom it’s easy to confuse with one another. There is (I believe) a script, although any narrative coherence is largely lost under what feels like multiple layers of improvisation. And yet… Somehow, the whole thing coheres, at least up to a point, by virtue of its own peculiar internal logic and succeeds almost entirely on its energy and that of its various collaborators, director, cast, and crew. I’m not even sure that that logic can be adequately expressed in words.… Read the rest
