With Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg has produced one of the crowning achievements of his film career, a harrowing and remarkable anti-war movie which remains riveting throughout its 170-minute duration. The film, which I saw during the week, will have its European premiere on the opening night of the Venice Film Festival (where it is showing out of competition) on September 3rd and goes on Irish release eight days later.
The film is bookended by extraordinary battle scenes which make for chilling and often shocking viewing. It opens with the D-Day landings on Omaha Beach in Normandy - filmed at Curracloe, Co Wexford last summer - as platoons of American soldiers are ferried to shore, some of them vomiting with fear at what lies ahead.
What follows is an unforgettable 25-minute battle sequence of cacophonous chaos as many of the soldiers are picked off like pins in a bowling alley. Bodies are blasted and blown to pieces, blood spurts through the air and turns the sea red, as the scale of the sacrifice escalates. The film ends on an even more startling and sustained battle sequence which gains in emotional power as many of the characters established over the course of the drama lose their lives in action.
Although superficially treading familiar ground - the film is set entirely from the point of view of American GIs who make up a calculatedly ethnic mix - Saving Private Ryan delivers its anti-war message with an intense realism rarely ever seen on a cinema screen. It is highly effectively shot in a muted, desaturated colour scheme by the gifted Janusz Kaminski and edited with potent precision by Michael Kahn.
Tom Hanks memorably plays the paternal captain leading his men on a mission to find a soldier whose three brothers have been killed in combat, and he is joined in an exemplary cast by actors previously best known from US indies - Matt Damon (as Private Ryan), Giovanni Ribisi, Barry Pepper, Edward Burns, Adam Goldberg, and most impressively, Tom Sizemore and Jeremey Davies.
The highly acclaimed theatre director, Deborah Warner, is set to make her cinema debut with a film of Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Last September, which has been adapted for the screen by John Banville. The formidable cast will feature Maggie Smith, Fiona Shaw, Michael Gambon, Jane Birkin and Lambert Wilson. Fiona Shaw and Deborah Warner are renowned for their many stage collaborations as actor and director.
A Scala/Thunder Pictures production, the film will be the first produced by Yvonne Thunder, with Neil Jordan as executive producer. The lighting cameraman is Slawomir Idziak, who lit Kieslowski's Three Colours Blue and Red, and Cathal Black's imminent Love And Rage. Shooting commences on August 31st and continues for seven weeks, mostly on location in Slane, Co Meath. The film, which is set in the early 1920s, will be released next year to coincide with the centenary of Elizabeth Bowen's birth.
The autumn is looking particularly busy for film production here with The Last September to be followed by Alan Parker's film of Angela's Ashes, starring Emily Watson, and Thaddeus O'Sullivan's Ordinary Decent Criminal, featuring Kevin Spacey and scripted by Gerry Stembridge. Both are due to go before the cameras in late September. And the Toronto-based film-maker Atom Egoyan was in Dublin last week, preparing for his next film, an adaptation of William Trevor's 1995 novel, Felicia's Journey, which will star Bob Hoskins.
