Géza Csákvár;
film; Disney; interview;
2024-04-25 15:27:00
Last year’s best film, which avoided cinemas, has arrived on the Disney platform. We talk about We Are All Strangers with director Andrew Haigh. The main character, Andrew Scott, also gave an exclusive video interview to Népsva, which can be viewed on the online page of our newspaper and in the mobile Népsva.
I’m not a big fan of clichéd announcements, but We Are All Strangers is the best film of 2023 that escaped Hungarian cinemas. One can philosophize about why: is it because of the intimate art film style, or because gay male love plays a significant role in the story? Maybe both?
But let’s go beyond that, since you can now watch it on streaming, you can experience the catharsis that is less and less available in connection with modern works. Of course, it wouldn’t be fair to ignore the fact that writer-director Andrew Haigh has leapt the miracle with several of his works: 2015’s 45 Years and 2017’s Lean on Pete were heart-wrenching masterpieces. In terms of emotional impact, We Are All Strangers surpasses even these. Based on Taichi Yamada’s novel Strangers, the film takes place in contemporary London. Screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) lives in an abandoned tower block in the English capital, buried in gloomy solitude. One night, she runs into a mysterious other resident, Harry (Paul Mescal). After the meeting, the latter tries to establish a relationship with the writer, and this quite unnerves the man from the mechanical rhythm of his everyday life. At first, Adam is withdrawn from any communication or relationship. Of course, he can’t stop the events. As Adam and Harry grow closer, Adam begins making surreal trips to his childhood home, where his long-dead parents (played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) both live and look the same age as they did thirty years before they died. And this creates a great opportunity to discuss the pain of the past and the present in the context of mourning the loss of parents – including how painful it can be to grow up gay and live in a not very open and accepting society. But it would be a crime to reveal more about the film’s plot – the viewer must believe the critic that it will have such an emotional impact that it will accompany him for months. It’s been a long time since he was able to express such deep emotions on film.
“The film’s producers, Graham Broadbent and Sarah Harvey, sent me the book about four or five years ago. I read it, put it aside, thought about it, but there was something in the original novel that I couldn’t get out of my head: the idea of meeting your parents again, even though they are no longer alive in your present life. This concept, this idea, was so fascinating to me as a way to explore family, love and the pain from our past. While the novel is a very traditional Japanese ghost story, I felt it was my job to turn it into something that made sense to me and made sense culturally in England, where the film is set. So, it was a very long and slow adaptation for the book to eventually become what the movie became,” said Andrew Haigh back in November, during a press conference for Golden Globe voters. Which was also discussed: in the original novel, the melancholic screenwriter falls in love with a woman – in the film, this character became Harry, played by Paul Mescal. “I’m gay myself, so it made sense to change the gender of the main character. For a long time, I wanted to tell a story about family and its relationship to gayness, queerness, and how different it can be for a queer child to grow up in a fundamentally heterosexual family. So that was also part of me flipping the sexual reality, it was a big change for the story as a whole. To me, the story is in many ways about understanding the nature of love and how romantic love relates to family love and how they are connected and intertwined. And so it was a perfect way to explore that element of the story,” underlined Andrew Haigh.
We argued to the director that such a personal and sensitive film can only be made if there are also personal motivations in the background. “Yes, it’s interesting that I wrote most of this during the pandemic. I locked myself in my house and thought about everyone in my life. For the people I’ve lost and the people who are still in my life but I don’t see them anymore and all those relationships. So I started from this very isolated place with the film and dug pretty deep into my own experiences. And while the film is not autobiographically inspired, it is definitely very, very personal to me and, without saying too much, people who know me can see me on screen as if I were there,” Andrew Haugh opened. “For example, the house we filmed in is my old childhood home, where I lived until I was nine years old. For me, it was about more than expressing myself on the screen. It’s more about wanting to be specific and really digging into the details of someone’s life, which is my life, in the hope that it extends to everyone else: the more specific you are, the more universal you become. I am now fifty years old. As you move forward in time, you begin to grieve more and more, you lose more and more, you grieve more and more. You start to go back in time and rebuild, reconstruct. And for me, this movie has always been about reunion. With each reunion, a kind of veil falls over your life: your old self, your previous life, who you once were. And you have to see how you can move on from that.”
I would only add this: you have to watch and experience the movie We Are All Strangers. A miracle.
Info: We are all strangers. Presented by Disney+
