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. It is not verbal logic that can be argued in those terms.
Insofar as the film works – and I’m not sure it’s totally successful – it works on the level of light, and sound, and performance, and energy, and kinetics. Possibly also on the level of staging, or of theatre (although this is most definitely made up of images in moving photography – it might be translatable onto the stage, but it’s most definitely, at least in this cinematographed version, a piece of cinema).
The soldiers are on a mission through a war zone. Their objective is not entirely clear. That is a subject used in countless more conventional war films, but Shoulders – that mis-pronounciation again – is not a conventional war film. If indeed it is a war film at all. Instead of rifles, the soldiers carry solid sticks of a similar size, yet via the magic of either speaking the word “bang!” or a sound effect of a gun shooting and gunshots off, these obviously not guns are transformed into guns: we know they are not guns, but the characters believe them to be guns, they use them as effectively as guns within the world of the film, and somehow, magically, we believe them to be guns. Countless films have, over the years, worked the stereotypical situation of someone putting a gun barrel in the mouth or under the chin and then proceeding to blow their brains out; when one of the characters does it here, they put a walking stick-sized piece of wood under their chin, and we immediately interpret it as someone about to blow their brains out.
At the Clapham Picturehouse Q&A following the CLIFF (look, it’s a better acronym than CIFF) screening I saw, the director began to answer a question without a microphone, projecting his voice as if he were using one, then was handed a real microphone, and commented, “oh, a real microphone.” This is someone who understands staging, props, and – yes, I’m going to say it – theatre. Those who know me well already know that my standard put-down of theatre – I’m not someone who often attends performances of that medium – is “a group of actors in long shot”. However, what Flatters is doing is about theatre in the sense of staging scenes, and using props. And part of what’s remarkable here, is his use of photography (cinematography). Because that, as a medium, comes with seemingly inseparable baggage.
We make a photograph “of” something. That something is real. Unless you’re in the business of showmanship or storytelling, in which case, you make it up to be photographed by the camera. So it’s real, but it’s not actually real, but professional behind the scenes (few in number here, in the hundreds on a big budget, Hollywood production). Remember the conceit of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, 1975), in which the knights clip-clopped through the forest without horses, banging coconuts together for the appropriate sound? The sticks for guns function on a similar level, except they are not vehicles of comedy so much as of absurdity. Don’t come expecting a comedy; this isn’t a film that made me laugh.
Much cinema, it must be said, is imprisoned by the naturalism of photography. Give me Méliès with his bullet hitting the face of the moon full in the eye, or Lotte Reinger’s shadow puppets, or even the three circle motif which Ub Iwerks turned into the head of Mickey Mouse for Disney. The cinema deserves better than naturalism, but most filmmakers are ignorant of how to do anything other than embrace it. According to your reaction, this might be a great movie, or it might be a total waste of your time. Yet there’s no denying it manages to avoid the trap of the photographic naturalism to which most movies are held hostage, without even being aware they’re in that trap – or that it even exists in the first place. And that, in itself, however good or bad the film, is a rare and remarkable achievement.
At 101 minutes, the film feels too long, making you wish it had been shorn of another 20 minutes. Certainly, the actors give their all, the cinematography and editing are completely out there and the director directs the hell out of whatever it is he is directing. Even if you’re not quite sure exactly what that is. In a word, intense.
Shoulders opens the Clapham International Film Festival which runs from Wednesday, November 27th to Saturday November 30th.
Trailer: