Brings back the paranoia of the 70s

Beckett ignores the political conspiracy and focuses on the character

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The American actor, John David Washington, filmed the movie Beckett before his most famous and largest movie Tenet, which these days coincides with its first annual release, the film that opened global cinemas between the first and second waves of the epidemic in August 2020.

This explains a surprising shot in the movie "Beckett", a Netflix original, in which Washington looks at a picture hanging on a wall at the US Embassy in Athens of former President Barack Obama.

The timing of the film's release contradicts the image that Washington wanted to paint for himself in the audience's mind. Washington is now a famous action star, and the viewer may be puzzled by his acceptance of the role of the ordinary street man in this low-budget film, which has the characteristics of European films.

The son of Oscar-winning star Denzel Washington, Washington plays an American tourist who is on vacation with his girlfriend April (Alicia Vikander), as he drives the car next to him and loses control. .

Inside the house, Beckett sees a blonde woman and a reddish boy, before the woman drags the boy and they disappear into the background.

What Beckett saw for a second, or what he should not see, will follow him and shape the events of the film even as he does not understand what is happening to him.

Italian director Fernando Filomareno, and this is his second film, presents his vision of films of political conspiracies or the so-called "man in the trap" films, or films of "the wrong man in the wrong place".

This is a sub-trend in action and espionage cinema that flourished in the fifties and sixties and reached its peak in the seventies.

Filmarino takes his ideas from classics such as Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much 1956 and North by Northwest 1959 by the same director, but Filmarino does not imitate those films, focusing more on Beckett's survival instinct, and we return to this point later.

Beckett does not reveal the plot here, nor does he save politicians from assassination, but rather saves himself.

When Beckett goes to the scene of the accident in disbelief, we see him lost in shock and not knowing what he's looking for.

Beckett does not know that his life is threatened.

Suddenly as he contemplates suicide in the house his car crashed into, we see a deep focus shot in which the blonde woman from afar points her gun at him and shoots.

The shot is shocking and Filmarino uses it perfectly, because he does not want to distract the viewer from the protagonist of the story.

In this scene, the focus is on the hero's reaction more than the woman who is trying to kill him, and the focus is on limiting the whole action to one take instead of cutting between the women.

And Beckett.

At the same time, the shooting of the bullet here symbolizes the beginning of the story of the film and the entry of Beckett into a cycle that does not end until the last minute.

Filomarin could spot her movements as she cautiously approached Beckett, but the man was unconcerned about these details which would serve only one purpose, to prolong the suspense.

On the other hand, the shot reflects the woman's high confidence in her ability to hit her target from afar.

All of Beckett's subsequent decisions are tainted by uncertainty, with a corrupt policeman embodied by Panos Corones collaborating with the woman, and a corrupt US Embassy diplomat embodied by Boyd Hallbrook, inviting him to take shelter on the embassy grounds before it turns out that he has another agenda.

Unlike the political conspiracy films of the '70s such as Three Days of the Condor or The Parallax View, the hero is not a betrayed intelligence man, not a political journalist exposing a conspiracy, Filmarino's vision revolves around an ordinary American.

Philomarino does Vikander, as the legend Hitchcock did with his heroine Janet Lee in "Psycho" in 1960, and it reflects the attempt to appear as a daring filmmaker, at the same time Philomarino wants to focus on Beckett's character more than revealing the details of the political conspiracy, and this is clear from the news received by the Beckett, through the secondary characters to inform him that the plot is over without us seeing its events on screen.

The transformations that the director focuses on are Beckett's transition from an ordinary tourist to a victim whom mysterious people want to kill.

As the events of the film progress, he turns from a fugitive man to a person who wants to take revenge on the aggressors when he sees them in front of him on the street, and the culmination of this transformation is the scene of "Batman" jumping from a multi-storey parking building onto the criminals' car.

The "Batman" jump scene is not considered organic in a movie like this, because this is a tourist named Beckett, not Lieutenant John McClain, the hero of the Die Hard films, and the second is always the wrong character in the wrong place.

On the other hand, there are scenes that seem more spontaneous than written in the text, and reflect the humanity of the character in a remarkable way, the most important of which is the scene of Beckett's failure to steal a motorcycle, and the scene of his struggle with the blonde woman two minutes before the "Batman" jump.

What is interesting here is that Filomareno puts the mold of a political plot into an empirical context, and what's more, what direction the director will go after this film.

• The interesting thing here is to know which direction the director will go after this film.

• The timing of the film's release contradicts the image that Washington wanted to paint for himself in the public's mind.

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