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Review
The Childhood of a Leader touches you like an icy finger on the back of your neck - review
Dir: Brady Corbet; Starring: Tom Sweet, Bérénice Bejo, Liam Cunningham, Robert Pattinson, Stacey Martin. 12A cert, 116 mins.
Films often retell or riff on history. Only rarely does one rise up to meet it. The Childhood of a Leader, the directorial debut from the 28-year-old actor Brady Corbet, is a historical drama set in a snowy fold of France in the aftermath of the First World War. But its electrifying, almost clairvoyant relevance to the immediate present touches you like an icy finger on the back of your neck.
Corbet’s film is loosely based on a 1939 short story by Jean-Paul Sartre about a troubled boy seduced by fascism, and comes scattered with biographical nuggets from the lives of actual historical dictators and demagogues. But it’s not actually about any of them. Instead, it’s a thunder-cracking parable about conditions under which the rot of megalomania first sets in – involving hereditary privilege, corruption, cold-eyed sexual predation, and worse.
The tyrant-in-waiting is Prescott, mesmerisingly played by the young British newcomer Tom Sweet: the ten-year-old son of an American diplomat (Game of Thrones’ Liam Cunningham) who’s helping broker the post-war peace talks in Paris. When we first glimpse the boy on the other side of a window, he’s surrounded by an angelic halo of candlelight: he’s even wearing a pair of wings for a nativity play, although his cherubic aura soon takes on an eerier glow when we see him later the same evening, methodically pelting the departing congregation with stones then scuttling off into the night. Benito Mussolini was expelled from school for similar.
There’s no apparent motive. But for a possible explanation, look to both the conduct of Prescott’s father and also his German-born mother (a superb Bérénice Bejo), who spends her days clattering around an ashen manoir somewhere outside the city with her son. (Every shot of the place seems to vibrate with resentment.) The boy exerts his will over both his mother and the serving staff – both plausibly and terrifyingly – through a kind of pubescent psychological warfare: the film’s three acts are even referred to on the title cards as "tantrums". While Prescott’s governess (Stacy Martin) reads to him from Aesop, he watches her silk blouse dust against the outline of her breast, which he later grabs at covetously during a maths lesson – not a naive erotic advance, but a calculated power play, with exactly the desired unnerving effect.
The connection between power and sex swims into focus when the boy walks in on his father and governess in the same room without a ready explanation – and there is also the whispered hint of an attraction between his mother and his father’s handsome journalist friend (Robert Pattinson), which Corbet devastatingly resolves in the film’s epilogue, a sustained multi-sensory panic attack of swirling camera movements and jabbing, accusatory strings. Scott Walker’s outstanding score pairs perfectly with Corbet’s zealous, wide-eyed image-making: they should work together again.
Over the last few years, Corbet has become a semi-familiar face in recent work from austere art-house bruisers such as Lars von Trier, Ruben Östlund and Michael Haneke. There’s an obvious crumb-trail between this film and Haneke’s own birth-of-fascism fable The White Ribbon, though the expressionistic swagger of the thing owes more to Welles and Dreyer – big names to drop, for sure, but the film’s precocity is all part of the poison-flecked fun. There’s an astonishing shot late in the film after Prescott does something horrific that begins looking down on the boy, lying on the hallway floor, from overhead – then the camera suddenly lolls back, as if the operator’s throat has been slit, to an inverted view of uncertain adults clustered in the corridor. The world turned on its head
Whether or not Corbet sensed clouds of authoritarian populism regathering when he and his co-writer Mona Fastvold were working on the screenplay, this result is a riveting, heart-clutching moral ghost-train ride for right now – and the first step in a filmmaking career to follow with bated breath.