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Time is short for the family at the heart of Joshua Oppenheimer’s new film. Mother, Father and their adult son eke out their days in an underground bunker with the walls decorated with priceless old masters, fine wine on the table and half a mile of bedrock above their heads. They gather each evening for formal dinners. They sing upbeat songs to keep the darkness at bay. “We thrive in our happily-ever-after,” they burble. “Together our future is bright.”
Time is similarly tight for the writer-director and his star when they beam in via video link from Berlin. It’s the last day of the film festival, a late scramble towards the finish line, and Oppenheimer and Tilda Swinton are each working to a separate stopwatch. Oppenheimer is scheduled to take part in a panel discussion; Swinton is booked on a plane out of town. Once Berlin is behind her, that is it, she is done. Hard deadline, clean slate. Her new life of freedom starts tomorrow, she says.
If you have to go out, you may as well go out with The End: a flamboyant, tear-stained final bow of a movie; a post-apocalypse musical sung by the last family on Earth. Swinton plays Mother, who is regal but fragile and claims to have danced for the Bolshoi in her youth. Michael Shannon is Father, a billionaire industrialist who poisoned the planet and is now dictating a hagiographical memoir to his innocent Son (George MacKay). The family have servants, food and show tunes to sustain them. Eventually, sure enough, their careful fabrications begin to break down. “I brought energy to billions of people,” Father splutters. “But sometimes I wonder if I did more harm than good.”
Oppenheimer is best known for The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, his groundbreaking documentaries about the Indonesian genocide. The End, too, began life as a documentary. Oppenheimer shadowed a Russian oil tycoon who was renovating a former Soviet compound in the Czech Republic. He met the tycoon’s family and took a tour of the bunker. “Afterwards, that bell could not be unrung,” he says. “I couldn’t imagine doing anything that did not investigate the questions that had haunted me that visit. How would you cope with leaving your loved ones behind? How would you cope with your guilt over the catastrophe that you’d fled? Can you raise your kids as blank canvases?” Fiction, he decided, was the only logical path. “I couldn’t imagine making any film with this family except a fly-on-the-wall documentary from inside the bunker, 25 years after they’d moved in.”
“I wonder if they’re in already?” Swinton says. “I bet they’re getting ready.”
I saw The End as a tale of environmental collapse. But Oppenheimer feels that the climate is the outer layer, the wider circle. The film is about the stories we spin and the lies we tell, whether these are about our own lives, or history, or our responsibility to the planet. “The issue is the same in all of my work,” he says. “It’s about inviting people to see themselves in the mirror.”
In The Act of Killing, he had the men behind Indonesia’s leftist purge re-enact their butchery in the style of their favourite film genres. The film’s chief subject, an elderly man called Anwar Congo, made little westerns, musicals and gangster flicks that showed how he had shot, stabbed and garotted his victims. These were Congo’s attempt at mythologising – or at least justifying – his actions. “But genre is a broken vessel. It’s always leaking,” says Oppenheimer. “And what we were always looking for was the cracks – the way that by trying to convince himself, idealise himself, he would somehow stumble upon the truth.”
The songs in The End play a similar role. They are falsehoods that draw attention to themselves; they lie and confess in the same breath. The director has an ambivalent relationship with Hollywood musicals. He likes them and hates them; he is seduced and repulsed. In the end, their sunny positivity turns his stomach.
“As a kid, there was a divorce in my family. My world was shattered apart and so I used to spend time with my grandfather and we’d take the train to New York. He loved musicals and we’d always go and sing along. As an eight-year-old, I loved it. The music was this little, safe bubble for me. But then later you realise that this sentimentality is fundamentally escapist and that the consequence of all this escapism is catastrophe. That might sound abstract, but I think it’s true. We live in a world where everyone is lying in well‑intentioned ways to get along – and the consequences of that are bleak.”
The way he talks about musicals, they sound like a nesting ground for populism, even fascism. Swinton isn’t prepared to go that far. “But I think musicals do have a relationship with delusion and self-deception in a way that opera doesn’t,” she says. “It’s easy to be swept up, taken in, particularly if you’re singing along. I’m thinking of that great moment in Cabaret where the boy starts singing Tomorrow Belongs to Me until everyone joins in, one by one. It can be quite sinister.”
Mother’s big number comes near the end of the film. She sings of the lost world she remembers: about how her mum would always crack up when telling the punchline of a joke; about how they would speculate about the lives of other motorists in a traffic jam. Her voice is reedy and groping. That fits the role, Swinton says. “It’s a reach, because we’re recording it live – I’m not miming to a guide track. You can hear the failure, the inarticulacy and the search for the words and the notes.”
She recalls her breakthrough role in Sally Potter’s 1992 film Orlando, parading through the gardens with a pair of grand saluki dogs. “I remember once hauling one of [the dogs] up and he was completely lost. The owner said: ‘Oh, he hates being picked up. He hates when his feet are off the ground.’ That’s how I see the mother. Her voice is high and frail and unmuscular. It’s the voice of a Nativity carol service. We had some gifted singers in the cast – not including me – but it’s like we’re all in different musicals.”
Naturally, The End won’t be to all tastes. It’s a strange and unclassifiable work of art, which is another way of saying that it’s awkward, ambitious and risks becoming opaque. The review in Variety decried the “turgid” 148-minute running time and lamented the lack of a conventional “thriller element”. The End, it concluded, “feels destined to flop”.
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Oppenheimer admits that the film is polarising. Some viewers expect an eat-the-rich satire and it is never quite that; it’s too sombre and measured and paints its characters in shades of grey. Anything less, he argues, would be another lie.
“Cinema, by and large, repeats our primary self-deceptions to the point where it’s actively destructive. I’m not just talking about mainstream Hollywood cinema. I’m talking about a lot of arthouse cinema and documentary cinema. Mainly, it tells us that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys. We’re positioned – invited – to see ourselves as the good guys.” That is self-defeating, he feels. “The End is about our deepest problems, our collective mortality, the cliff towards which we’re all headed. And we don’t solve that problem by patting ourselves on the back.”
Our time is up. The director disappears, chaperoned to a discussion panel next door. Swinton sticks around. Her flight is not until tomorrow. She is heading home to Scotland and has nothing in her diary.
While in Berlin, Swinton received a lifetime achievement award. It was the festival’s tribute to a distinctive career that has wended from an formative association with Derek Jarman through Hollywood blockbusters and Oscar success to collaborations with the likes of Pedro Almodóvar, Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson. At the podium, she used her acceptance speech to criticise what she described as “state-perpetrated and internationally enabled mass murder,” while praising independent cinema as a melting pot, a port in the storm, “immune to the efforts of occupation … or the development of riviera property”. Swinton didn’t go so far as to mention Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu by name, but it was perfectly clear whom she was talking about.
In her youth, the actor bounced from Communist party meetings to stints on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company. That is her pedigree. Perhaps it established her core principles. She sees politics and art as connected, indivisible, with each side informing and affecting the other.
Swinton explains that she can speak only for herself. “But I was in a privileged position and decided to use it. I thought: ‘What can I say that might be good for people to hear?’ I don’t mean in a delusional, panacea, ‘Oh, it will be all right, darling’ kind of way. Nor do I want to paralyse them with fear and loathing and division. And reminding people of that connection felt right.” She shakes her head. “Because if you look at all of this shitshow that we are in right now, the only way it works is when it’s possible to disconnect people and manipulate them. As soon as we remember our capacity to be connected, we have a fighting chance.”
Cinema provides that connection. The experience is precious, she thinks. It is also at a premium. “Because it’s possible to have your minds changed in the cinema in a way that is hugely political. We need that now more than ever. If you think of the world as a fairground, all of the stalls are being shut down. You can’t do this here and you can’t say that here. Whereas this is a stall that’s open 24/7 around the globe. It’s not just a haven. It’s a place of transformation.”
I worry that I am getting mixed messages from her Berlin lap of honour. On the one hand, she is here rallying the troops, leading from the front. On the other, it appears that she is in full retreat and has no plans to make another film anyway.
Swinton raises a hand in protest. “I’m not stepping away from cinema,” she says. “I’m just stepping away from certain aspects of cinema.” She thinks she needs time to recalibrate. She wants to figure out what she needs to do to stay useful. “And you really can’t do that when you’re flying around the world, tied to a big carbon footprint. So I’m happy to say I won’t be travelling for months. I’m not shooting another film this year. I’ve been in a spin cycle for much too long.”
To put it another way, this isn’t the end; it may be the end of the beginning. “And here’s the other thing,” she says suddenly. “On the most prosaic level, I’m going to be sleeping in my own bed again. I’ll have a sky and an ocean and human beings around me. It’s not a bunker; it’s home.”
