From its title, Oscar Hudson’s funny first film, “Straight Circle,” evokes paradoxical oddities, which the writer-director superimposes on his deadpan satire on nationalism and geographic borders. The story of two enemy soldiers patrolling a militarized border from inside a shared outpost, the film’s fictional premise gradually transforms and eventually transcends the shortcomings of its broad political scope as it leans toward abstraction.
The film comes in with a bang, introducing the fragile ceasefire between its warring (albeit anonymous) desert nations via a clever split-screen prologue in its first five minutes. Amid the pomp and circumstance, the leaders on either side of a rickety fence hold ceremony, inadvertently interrupting each other thanks to microphone feedback, while footage of the duel—each with its own handheld, jittery camera movements and unique color timing, one hot and the other cold—changes place and subject. This ironic brilliance aestheticizes the point that Hudson hammers home ad nauseam for 109 minutes, with varying degrees of success: these nations, despite their different uniforms and military traditions, could just as easily be one and the same person.
While still fun, “Straight Circle” is at its best when it literalizes the blurred line between borders through this two-pronged visual approach, although it only takes this form for a few more minutes near the end. However, in the meantime, Hudson continues to play seductive tricks, starting with his casting. The story focuses, for the most part, on two soldiers with opposing allegiances, viewpoints, and ideologies. One of them, a bald man with glasses, filled with chauvinistic fervor, dons a large black beret and a white uniform, and performs a gestural and conspicuous salute which earns his compatriots the epithet “slap”. The other, a bearded and ragged civilian from his country’s military reserves, is less enthusiastic and often removes his service fatigues and Ottoman-style fez to smoke cigarettes and lounge in the sun. However, what viewers may not realize at first is that these characters are played by real-life twin brothers Elliott and Luke Tittensor (of “House of the Dragon” fame), respectively, giving the film’s sardonic events an eerie quality.
The incorporated countries in question do not seem to matter, which is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it allows the film’s distinctly English characters to immediately express Hudson’s overall point that, beyond our most exterior and noisy details, people are all the same and that we should just get along. Politically, the “right circle” tends to look like a “Coexist” bumper sticker with all the specifics stripped away, until real-world comparisons start to hurt it. A story like this is sure to bring to mind its existing counterparts, whether it is the ceremonial Wagah border between India and Pakistan, or the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, or many ongoing border conflicts around the world, which arise not only from social and geopolitical specificities, but also from the history of Western imperialism – and, in some cases, specifically British imperialism. The film’s British production and its British filmmaker can’t help but occupy much of the film’s negative space, inviting questions about who and what exactly is being satirized (or perhaps patronized) in this story of desert nations at war.
However, despite the film’s orientalist outlook, “Straight Circle” slowly but surely disengages from any form of reality and becomes a far more absurd and anthropological study when an impending dust storm disorients the characters and viewers. Beyond a certain point, both sides of the border become the same, just as the physical and psychological boundaries between the two patrollers begin to blur, resulting in a surprisingly touching drama through personal anecdotes, sprinkled with surrealism and performed with emotional gusto by its lead siblings, as they dig into what haunts and drives each character. The film is made even more inviting by composer Maxwell Sterling’s rapturous horns and cinematographer Christopher Ripley’s vivid textures of the desiccated environment, grounding even the film’s wackiest events in visceral reality.
The less realistic the film seems – in the geopolitical sense – the more human it becomes. This is perhaps Hudson’s greatest sleight of hand, and it turns “Straight Circle”‘s initial weaknesses into its most entertaining strengths. No one who watches the film will likely come away with a deeper understanding of the military conflict, but there is ultimately a wonderful psychology to the story, expressed through fleeting flourishes that are sorely missed when set aside. Perhaps this should have been weirder than it already is, but it’s a bold change to begin with and marks a fitting first chapter for Hudson, in what is sure to be an interesting career.
