Queen and Country

Chil­dren cheer­ing in the rub­ble and scat­tered books on the site of a fresh­ly bombed school in wartime Lon­don. It’s a famil­iar open­ing scene, and it should be, hav­ing been quite lit­er­al­ly recy­cled from direc­tor John Boorman’s semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Blitz charmer, Hope and Glo­ry, from 1987. Queen and Coun­try, an unof­fi­cial sequel, resumes the sto­ry of Bill Rohan, now prepar­ing to join the army as a young man.

With Her Majesty’s finest off fight­ing the Com­mie front in Korea, Bill (Cal­lum Turn­er) and his fel­low pla­toon mates are des­per­ate for a taste of the action. But with their deploy­ment indef­i­nite­ly delayed, the boys grow increas­ing­ly dis­en­fran­chised with the monot­o­ny of reg­i­men­tal life, and thoughts quick­ly turn to mat­ters on the home­front. Enter Ophe­lia (Tam­sin Egerton), the strik­ing posh slice with whom our Bill falls hope­less­ly in love. From the moment he notices her, he sees pain in her eyes, and sure enough it is revealed that she is a damsel in dis­tress. But the more Bill chas­es her, the more inevitable it seems that his heart will be broken.

It’s not all pranks and pup­py love, how­ev­er. Like Ter­ence Davies doing Dad’s Army, Boorman’s film has a dark­er edge than it might first appear. Amid the heartache, grand roman­tic ges­tures, plum­my accents and some writhing the­atrics from Caleb Landry Jones, there’s also David Thewlis’ ten­der and won­der­ful­ly under­stat­ed per­for­mance as the shell-shocked sol­dier. But what real­ly stands out in Queen and Coun­try is the emer­gence of new British tal­ent Cal­lum Turn­er. It’s not a per­for­mance of chest-beat­ing phys­i­cal­i­ty or grandiose mono­logu­ing, but one of sub­tle expres­sion and potent inti­ma­cy, enriched by humour and youth­ful vigour.