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The Guardian
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
What is Britain's elusive 'national character'? The Ballad of Wallis Island might just tell us
It is, according to no less an authority than the romcom king Richard Curtis, destined to be 'one of the greatest British films of all time'. But don't let that put you off. For The Ballad of Wallis Island – the unlikely new tale of a socially awkward millionaire who inveigles two estranged former halves of a folk-singing duo into playing a private gig on his windswept private island – isn't some floppy-haired Hugh Grant vehicle, but a reflection on our national character that is altogether more of its times. It's a lovely, melancholic comedy about the acceptance of failure, loss and the slow understanding that what's gone is not coming back: an ode to rain and cardigans, lousy plumbing and worse puns, shot in Wales on a shoestring budget in a summer so unforgiving that a doctor was apparently required on set to check for hypothermia. Its main characters have not only all messed up at something – relationships, careers, managing money – but seem fairly capable of messing up again in future. Yet as a film it's both gloriously funny and oddly comforting, taking a world where everything seems to be slowly coming adrift and making that feel so much more bearable. There's no such thing as a national character really, of course; or at least no set of indisputably British traits on which 68 million people could ever all agree. Yet there's a clear pattern to how we like to see ourselves represented on screen – endearingly hopeless, perennially mortified, well-meaning but liable to be eaten alive by Americans – which is telling. There was much flapping recently about polling showing only 41% of generation Z say they're proud to be British, a steep decline on previous generations. But it remains unclear whether the issue here is gen Z, or the idea of Britain in which they have lately been expected to take pride. If Britishness didn't seem quite so puffed-up and aggressive, so relentlessly focused on who is deemed not British enough; if it could simultaneously embrace a more self-deprecating, more tolerant, distinctly embarrassed sense of national identity, would that be one with which some people felt more comfortable? For we are not, fundamentally, a 'make Britain great again' kind of place. Even when our politicians deliberately try to evoke the Maga spirit, they do it (thankfully) badly: Britain's answer to Elon Musk's terrifying Doge ('department of government efficiency'), as launched this week by the Reform party, is headed by some tech dweeb you've never heard of whose role essentially boils down to poking round Kent county council looking for 'waste', before presumably discovering that he hasn't really got the power to fire anyone. With all due respect to Rachel Reeves's mission to rebuild the nation, meanwhile, the most recognisably British part of her big speech on investing in infrastructure this week was that it revolved around regional buses. The pinnacle of our national ambitions is no longer to rule the waves but just to be able to get into Huddersfield a bit faster than previously, along a road with slightly fewer potholes, and it's time to own that with pride: this is, goddammit, who we really are. For this is the nation that made a copper-bottomed hit out of How to Fail, Elizabeth Day's podcast in which guests cheerfully spill the beans on all the ways they have screwed up at life; a nation that can't accept a compliment to save its life, and knows that if by accident you ever become good at something then you'd better make up for it fast by stressing just how bad you are at something else. (In this week's published extracts from How Not to Be a Political Wife, a British title for a memoir if ever there was one, the demonstrably successful and well-connected Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine returns again and again to the failure of her marriage and the impossibility of keeping up with high-powered friends: she's been in the newspaper business long enough to know her readers would infinitely rather hear about the fall than the rise.) We dwell with relish not just on our individual failings but on our glorious national defeats, memorialising all the football tournaments we ever lost on penalties and weaving heroic disasters – Scott dying in the Antarctic, the retreat from Dunkirk – into our national story. We are the country that turned 'we're shit, and we know we are' into a sporting anthem; that treats failure less as a necessary stage of innovation than as a steady state to be lived with, like the weather. Our tendency to assume things will go wrong certainly has its drawbacks – not least a tendency to regard unalloyed good news with crabby suspicion – but it perhaps makes us more philosophical when they do. Not so much a land of hope and glory, as one of perennial mild disappointment. In the past, this unerring ability to puncture our own balloons might have been a healthy trait, a safeguard against a world power getting carried away by its own importance. Of late, the same Eeyorish diffidence feels more like a way of coming to terms with inevitable decline. But either way, tucked inside The Ballad of Wallis Island is the germ of a national story: struggling to tell other people how we really feel about them, in the rain, but still somehow finding reasons to be cheerful. If that's not a version of Britishness we can all get behind, what is? Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How Carey Mulligan overcame singing 'nerves' on folk music film The Ballad of Wallis Island
In The Ballad of Wallis Island Carey Mulligan plays one half of fictional folk duo McGwyer Mortimer alongside Tom Basden, and the actor tells Yahoo UK of how being on set helped her face her nerves over singing on screen. The actor plays Nell Mortimer opposite Basden's Herb McGwyer. The duo parted on bad terms years earlier but are brought back together when millionaire fan Charles (Tim Key) hires them for a gig on the remote island where he lives. The Ballad of Wallis Island is written by Basden and Key, the former also composed the soundtrack, and it explores the idea of music, creativity and lost love in surprisingly touching ways. For Mulligan it was a role she jumped at the chance at, even if the prospect of singing was nerve-wracking: "I loved it, I loved all the songs, Tom would send me the songs and then send me exactly what I would sing in them because I can't pick a harmony on my own or anything like that. So Tom would be like 'this is what I sing and this is your bit.' "I think every song that was in the film was already written into the script of what would be [in it] so we did a little rehearsal montage. But it was all very easy and I think because [James Griffiths, the director] made a set that was just so lovely, and we had such a gorgeous crew. "I didn't really have the nerves that I probably would have had if I was in a different kind of set but Griff just made such a gorgeous set so it was kind of lovely. I loved it." Basden's composition of McGwyer Mortimer's songs were a way for him to "lyrically illuminate their back story", and he wanted them to feel "hopeful and romantic". "It was conveying emotions that the characters themselves wouldn't talk about," he explains. "So in that sense the music is doing a bit of story work for us, because it's helping the audience understand emotionally what's going on for these characters and why Herb ends up feeling the way that he does without having to kind of reveal it directly. "I think music really has such a big part to play in all of our lives because it sort of gives us an emotional soundtrack to parts of our life that we were not able to provide ourselves." While it might be easy to assume a movie starring Mulligan that has a folk soundtrack might have taken some inspiration from her real-life husband Marcus Mumford and his work in Mumford & Sons, Basden reveals there was no set inspiration for the fictional folk duo's music. "I didn't want the music to feel like it was inspired by one particular artist or anything like that," he says. "There are some songs that I wanted to have a slightly timeless feel, like a '60s, '70s singer-songwriter feel, and others were a bit more modern. A bit more niche folky, in some ways." He adds: "I guess maybe Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, or a bit of Ryan Adams and James Yorkston & the Athletes [were inspirations]. People like that, those kind of folk country acts that I've liked over the years." Through Basden's character the film also deftly explores the notion of selling out and what it means to sacrifice ones creativeness for a taste of fame, something Herb battles with himself about over the course of the movie. It was an interesting idea to tackle, the actor says: "I think the thing with music specifically is it's really less so much about fame and more about relevance, someone trying to stay fashionable. "And I think that's just so difficult, it's part of getting into your 40s that you gotta have to accept that you just can't appeal to 20-year-olds in the way that other 20-year-olds can — and that's fine, you know? But like I think that's a big part of the lesson that Herb in particular learns in this film, is that you have to grow old gracefully, no matter what you do." Even with Mulligan and Basden playing the folk duo at the centre of the story it's Key's character Charles who steals the whole show, thanks to his dry humour and relatable awkwardness. And he was a character that Key particularly enjoyed creating from scratch. "It felt very easy and natural when we did that when the character emerged in 2006, when we're writing the short film. He's one of many characters that we would be flinging backwards and forwards when we were in a sketch group and I think he's some kind of amalgam of all sorts of adults that your parents know who walks into a room [and acts awkwardly]. "So it's those people all sort of blended together, and then put a heart inside him and let him go. It was a very enjoyable thing to write, and a very enjoyable thing to perform once you're up and running. "His journey through the film was very enjoyable because he sort of starts as just a bumbling agent of chaos and then ends as something slightly more than that." Basden and Key first created the story back in 2006 for a short film The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island, they reworked the narrative for a feature-length story as they had a "great fondness" for both the short film they'd created and the characters. Basden shares: "[We had a] feeling that we could do more with it, that the the story actually is bigger than the short film format can maybe afford to it, and that if we went back to it we could do something that really elevated it and kind of brought it to life for a full length film. So that was our hope." What the creative team appreciate is the chance to share an indie film in cinemas, particularly at a time when blockbusters dominate the landscape. Basden explains: "I feel like cinema is dominated by sequels and superheroes and reboots, computer games and toys turned into films and I think it's really important that people have original independent cinema, that they have new stories that really speak to what's happening to them now. "I just really hope that people value that, and come to the cinema to kind of be part of that because it's something that I think for people who make films, who love film, is just so important. It feels like originality is at at the heart of cinema still." "It's a chance to connect, isn't it?" Griffiths adds. "Over laughter or emotion or crying together, you don't get that in your front room. I mean, you might do, but in a cinema there's something about coming together. "Comedy, music, horror, some of those genres, they're really better experienced in a theatrical space." And The Ballad of Wallis Island is certainly best viewed in a cinema. The Ballad of Wallis Island premieres in UK cinemas on Friday, 30 May.
The Guardian
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Ballad of Wallis Island review – funny, melancholy yarn of a folk duo reunited by oddball superfan
Fictional folk duo McGwyer Mortimer (played by Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan) were big, back in the day – the day in question being circa 2009. But they weren't that big: not Dylan-big, not even Cat Stevens-big. They graced some NME covers, they played Glastonbury, but even at the height of their success they could definitely pop to the shops without getting mobbed. Still, you're always Dylan-big to your biggest fans, and Charles (Tim Key) is exactly that. He's also a reclusive lottery winner, giving him the motive and the means to stage a private reunion gig for an audience of one on a remote island. Basden and Key starring in a film about a folk band reunion might have you expecting something a little bit sketch comedy, but this turns out to be a different beast: a funny but also melancholy piece of work. It's more interested in maintaining a consistent and sincere emotional connection than in wild virtuoso showboating. As superfan Charles, Key blends a bit of the pleasant oddness he always brings to his acting roles with the verbal playfulness familiar to admirers of his poetry. Charles has a galloping case of verbal diarrhoea; like a perpetual talk radio DJ, he overflows with continual jokey non-jokes – 'Houston, we have chutney, and it's not a problem' – and is seemingly petrified of the possibility of leaving dead air. Basden does excellent work as a character, in contrast, whose face does the talking: a spiky presence, all low cut T-shirts, wounded ego and rounded shoulders. It's a perfect performance both as an actor and, when the songs come along, as a musician. Basden wrote the music here and it is played and sung completely straight; it's all rather beautiful. And while she might be a bigger name, Mulligan has a lot less to do than either of them: she is entirely plausible as a woman who was once part of the duo and now makes jam in Portland with her geek-chic birdwatching husband. You'll leave wanting your own island, your own gig and your own lock of Carey Mulligan's hair. The Ballad of Wallis Island is in UK cinemas from 30 May
