A grieving academic and a hawk

    In H is for Hawk, Claire Foy plays a grieving woman who adopts a goshawk as a way of reconnecting with nature, and, just as important, avoid a return to the normalcy of life before her father's sudden death.

    Director Philippa Lowthorpe bases her movie on a well-recieved memoir by Helen Macdonald. Lowthorpe's story requires Foy's Helen, an academic studying and teaching at Cambridge, to spend much of the movie carrying the hawk while wearing a cumbersome protective glove. 

   When the hawk, though tethered to Helen's arm, flaps her wings, a sense of nature's uncontrollability becomes palpably present. Hawks are natural-born hunters, and much of the movie involves Helen's attempts to allow the bird, which she names Mabel, to hunt before returning to its perch on her arm.

   I've read that bird specialists were used and that numerous hawks were employed for the filming, but that doesn't make the feat any less impressive. Maybe it's just my skittishness, but I felt a sense of imminent danger, as if the hawk might strike at any moment. 

    Added emotional weight derives from Helen's slide into a severe depression that cuts her off from her academic life and turns her into a bit of a recluse. She shares her apartment with Mabel. Her Cambridge colleagues don't always approve. Some are indifferent. Some do their best to indulge her passion.

   Helen understands that goshawks aren't affectionate creatures. Still, she develops a connection, perhaps one-sided, with the bird. 

    Wisely, Foy makes little attempt to ingratiate herself with viewers. The movie's warmth is generated in large part by Brendan Gleeson, who appears in flashbacks as Helen's idiosyncratic news photographer father. His love for his daughter includes chiding humor and acceptance. Clearly, the two operate on the same wavelength.

   A strong supporting cast includes Lindsay Duncan as Helen's mother, Josh Dylan as her brother, and Denise Gough as Helen's devoted friend.  

    And, of course, there's Mabel. 

   Lowthorpe captures the liberating beauty of Mable in flight, but never loses sight of the fact that the relationship between Mable and Helen contains an element of unease. That edginess allows the movie to sidestep any sentiment that might have undermined the sense of irreparable loss, which the movie ably captures and sustains.

 

She's growing tired of life in the cult

Say this: Polish director Malgorzata Suzumowska knows how to create a mood. In The Other Lamb, Suzumowska tells the story of a small cult in which a group of women follow the lead of a figure known as Shepherd (Michiel Huisman). It doesn't take long to realize that Huisman's character -- despite a physical resemblance to a stereotypical western Jesus -- is anything but a "good" shepherd. He tyrannizes the women, emphasizes their "impurity" and violates them sexually. The cult consists of two groups of women: Wives and daughters. When daughters begin to menstruate, Shepherd initiates them into the world of childbearing -- with him as the incestuous father. In this world, only females are allowed to survive. A movie such as The Other Lamb needs at least one character to undergo a change of consciousness. In this case, the job falls to Selah (Raffey Cassidy), a teenager who gradually awakens to the reality of her oppressive situation with help from a wife (Denise Gough) who has been shunned and tormented. Ousted from their first home by the police, the group wanders in search of a new dwelling. You know where all of this is headed. Suzumowska scores high on atmospherics and imagery but the story takes us nowhere we haven't been before. The film, by the way, marks the director's English-language debut. It might have seemed deeper and more mysterious had it been made in Polish with subtitles and not set in North America.

The story of a ground-breaking author

Keira Knightley plays the title character in Colette, a movie that's as much period piece as character study.

Colette, the French novelist, died in 1954 at the age of 81. The movie Colette focuses on roughly a quarter of Colette's fascinating life, notably the years she spent with her first husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars, a man who published under the name Willy. Colette wrote the famous Claudine novels, but Willy took credit for them.

A bon vivant, literary entrepreneur and music critic, Willy hired others to author books to which he proudly put his name. His major talent seems to have been for promotion, which suggests that he may have been born a century too soon.

Colette, who was 14 years younger than Willy, eventually divorced him. She went on to have a distinguished literary career, as well as a personal life that included two additional marriages and various relationships with women.

Director Wash Westmoreland (Still Alice) uses a portion of Colette's life to make a stylistically conventional movie about an unconventional woman.

As far as it goes, Colette proves enjoyable with Keira Knightley bringing a sense of fiber and substance to the role of Colette and Dominic West immersing himself in a convincing turn as man who relied on preening charm, profligate spending, and a charismatic personality.

Westmoreland doesn't shortchange Colette's adventurous sex life, presenting one episode in which Colette has an affair with an American woman who's visiting Paris (Eleanor Tomlinson). So, by the way, does Willy. Colette also establishes an on-going relationship with Mathilde de Morny (Denise Gough), an aristocrat and gender rebel who shocked polite society by dressing like a man.

Colette and Willy tolerated each other's sexual digressions; according to the movie, Colette prized honesty more than she valued fidelity. Willy agrees, but he’s not quite up Colette’s demanding standard.

Part tale of feminist assertion and part portrait of turn-of-the-century Paris, Colette engages without generating sustained excitement for a title character whose sharp edges have been buffed into submission by what may be a little too much production value.

Colette likely will be appreciated more as carefully appointed, nicely acted period piece than a provocative look at a woman who didn't so much challenge norms as bypass them with blithe indifference.

Put another way, Colette presents its subject with honesty but never throws down the gauntlet of challenge that would have pushed audiences out of their comfort zones, something Colette deserved.