Beckett
John David Washington plays an innocent man on the run in a compelling Hitchcockian thriller set in the mountains of Northern Greece.
The weakest thing about Beckett is its title. It has nothing to do with the assassinated Archbishop of Canterbury, nor does it remotely reflect the oeuvre of Samuel Beckett. So the title is misleading. And yet it’s also entirely appropriate. Who is Beckett? Precisely. He is a mystery but is given a well of human compassion by John David Washington in a thriller that Hitchcock would be proud to call his own. If the director, the eminently promising Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, had called his film Unwitting Witness it might have been more explanatory but also more ordinary. Despite its dead simple premise, there is nothing ordinary about Beckett, the film.
A racially mixed American couple are on holiday in North Greece. He is played by John David Washington, she, April, by Alicia Vikander. The film opens in their bed and the love continues until tragedy strikes. The couple speaks in the kind of romantic shorthand that only lovers do, and they invent mischievous backstories for the other tourists they spot. The unfamiliar scenery is breathtakingly beautiful and feels authentic and unexplored. Like Cito Filomarino, the Thai cinematographer deserves credit for an arrestingly visual film, from the striking POVs to the haunting final shot. Perhaps Beckett and April are a little too much in love; we know it can’t last. But there is a wonderful chemistry between the pair, along with the novelty of their casting. Yet Washington’s – Beckett’s – skin colour is not alluded to until deep into the movie, yet is incredibly significant to the plot. Let’s just say that a black man running from the police in the mountains of Greece is unlikely to go unnoticed. And anybody who lends a hand suffers the consequences terribly.
While Beckett is painted as an Everyman, and is pretty much an enigma in the terms of his backstory, the clues are there for the unpicking. He wears a Varsity football jacket, which may explain his athletic endurance. He is American enough that he barely understands a word of Greek, and expects – or at least hopes – that the country folk he intercepts can understand the lingua franca. There’s a wonderful scene when he finally encounters a couple on a hilltop with a mobile phone – who also happen to be tending to an apiary. Yet bee stings are the least of Beckett’s problems. There’s another brief moment when, like Jason Bourne, he attempts to apprehend the female rider of a motorbike, only to be beaten off with a torrent of invective.
Ferdinando Cito Filomarino certainly exhibits a modest mastery of his medium and this Netflix release should mark him out as a talent to watch. These sorts of films – genre thrillers with ordinary people inadvertently mixed up in political conspiracies – are two-a-penny and often top-bill Liam Neeson. Here, Beckett feels entirely real and we, like him, wonder what the hell is going on. All we know is that every cop in the country wants him dead (for some reason) and are primed to shoot him on sight. We also know that whoever helps him will be brutally dealt with and that, being black, Beckett stands out like a sore thumb. A picture of the then-current American president, Barack Obama, just adds a slap of irony. And don’t forget that Obama was in power during the time of the anti-austerity riots in Athens…
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: John David Washington, Boyd Holbrook, Vicky Krieps, Alicia Vikander, Maria Votti, Panos Koronis, Lena Kitsopoulou, Omiros Poulakis, Marianna Bozantzoglou, Andreas Marianos, Olga Spyraki, and the voice of Michael Stuhlbarg.
Dir Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, Pro Luca Guadagnino, Marco Morabito, Francesco Melzi d'Eril and Gabriele Moratti, Screenplay Kevin A. Rice, from a story by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, Ph Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Pro Des Elliott Hostetter, Ed Walter Fasano, Music Ryuichi Sakamoto, Costumes Giulia Piersanti, Dialect coach Charlotte Fleck.
Frenesy Film/MeMo/Rai Cinema/RT Features/Wise Pictures-Netflix.
109 mins. Italy/Brazil. 2021. Rel: 13 August 2021. Cert. 15.
