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THE CHILDHOOD OF A LEADER – Scott Walker
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Any time you have a film based on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre you know you’re in for a challenging time at the movies; so it is with The Childhood of a Leader, director Brady Corbet’s film based on the great French existentialist philosopher’s 1939 short story. It tells the tale of a man named Prescott (Robert Pattinson), an American who grew up in Paris, and who at the story’s outset has already been revealed to be a fascist leader in a far-right European political party in the years immediately preceding World War II. The film then jumps back to his childhood in the years immediately following the conclusion of World War I, and examines both the child’s innate predilection for egotism, as well as the circumstances and influences that caused him to develop his particular identity and authoritarian world-view, drawing comparisons with people like Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and other megalomaniacal leaders of their ilk. The film, which also stars Bérénice Bejo, Liam Cunningham, and Tom Sweet, was the darling of the 2015 Venice International Film Festival, and has been lauded by art-house film critics, who called it “a strange and startling film,” “relentlessly sombre and compelling,” and “a dark, enigmatic piece of work”. Read more…
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