Claire Foy leads a drama sensitive to slow sorrow

Helen (Claire Foy) is not the kind of woman to wallow in her emotions. After the success of her beloved father (Brendan Gleeson), she insists that she is not transmitted (“Dad would hate all kinds of massage”); When relatives ask if she is fine, she rejects their concerns and tells them that she is fine.

But a sorrow as large as Helen does not disappear simply because he refuses language or tears. He simply finds other methods of expression. A few months after the death of his father, Helen adopted a Goshawk, one of the birds of prey that she and he loved to spot their bird observation expeditions, and immediately makes him his whole world.

H is for HawkDirected by Philippa Lowthorpe and co-written by Lowthorpe and Emma Donoghue based on the Memoirs of Helen Macdonald of the same title, is the history of this rather unusual adaptation mechanism. To appreciate the birds and our link with them, it is captivating and endearing – a cooler socket, certainly, that another weekend on the owners of dogs or cats. But as an exploration of sorrow, it is hampered by an execution time of 128 minutes which propagates its emotional power too thin.

Initially, Helen seems to manage his father’s death, the photojournalist Alisdair Macdonald, and could reasonably expect anyone who has just lost what she calls “the only person in the world who really understood me”. She continues with her teaching scholarship at the University of Cambridge and plans to apply for a prestigious new job. She hangs out with her best friend, Christina (Denise Gough, here as sympathetic as she Andor The character is despicable). She even begins to go out with a beautiful art dealership, Amar (Arty Froushan), which she met on Twitter. (H is for Hawk takes place in 2007, which makes very early adopters.)

But once Amar leaves, it collapses, although the rupture seems less the cause of its failure than the proverbial straw which broke the back of the camel. It is at this stage that she decides to buy Mabel, The Goshawk, and comes across love heels at first glance. For Helen, Mabel is not a simple distraction, neither a pet, nor a hobby – Mabel is her hunting partnerAs she will cling to anyone who dares to invoke one of these other words.

Especially at the beginning, H is for Hawk May seem a strong argument to take the falconry. Mabel, or rather the actors of trained birds who play it, is a deliciously magnetic presence on the camera, with its large alert eyes, its beautiful feathers and its inhuman fascinating movements. The DP Charlotte Bruus Christensen captures both Mabel herself and the magnificentness of the forests and the fields that she takes as a hunting ground with a real feeling of reverence. If anything, it is more difficult to understand why the others – like Stu (Sam Spruell), a friend and colleague Falconer – had warned Helen of not obtaining a goshawk in the first place, since Mabel generally seems high for a wild predator.

But the sorrow infiltrates. The script, of Lowthorpe and Donoghue, is particularly well observed with regard to the almost comical oddity of mourning. In a scene, Helen tells a server of restaurants that his father has just died, and he returns with a plate stacked with desserts as if he does not know what else to do. In another, Helen and his brother, James (Josh Dylan), are broken on the dark question of the director of the funeral to know if they could want a “theme” coffin decorated in designs of a ridiculously sticky nature.

Foy, who previously worked with Lowthorpe on Netflix The crownDo an excellent job to capture the repression of Helen’s upper lip, with gestures as small as the way it pushes tears that sometimes flow – as if they are only physical troubles rather than reflections of inner agitation.

The more Helen becomes obsessed on Mabel, the more it seems to decrease in all other aspects of its life. She flourishes in her work, ignores questions about her future, the distances of her friends and family. On rare occasions when she is forced to leave the house for non -Mabels reasons, she could bring Mabel with her – leading to the funny view of a party matter giving this woman with a bird a very wide berth – or tightening her teeth through an unbearable cacophony of chatter and insane reduction music.

It is a sensitive representation of the shift of a person in depression. The problem is that H is for Hawk “gradual” errors for “slow”. The film is ample with some repetitions of scenes or ideas that we have already seen, which makes it difficult for the emotions of the film to take the momentum they need; A tighter assembly could have distilled these feelings to a more powerful shape.

But then, the required patience is in accordance with Helen and the favorite pastime of his father. “Look carefully so that you remember what you have seen,” he said as they search the sky with their twins for interesting birds. The flashbacks in their happier days are interspersed throughout the film, triggered by details as small as it crushes it on his arm which has never had time to heal, or the layout of the seats in a car which she inherited. Helen’s worship for his father throws him into an almost angelic glow, frequently backlit by a brilliant white sun that could radiate the doors of the sky themselves. But the relaxed performance of Gleeson nevertheless guarantees that he feels like a human being, rather than a sentimental symbol of parental perfection.

Symbolism, instead, is left to the bird. Mabel could be Helen’s father, or Helen’s grief, or Helen herself; She recalls that death comes for all of us, or that nature is full of beautiful and impressive things. I found myself asking myself what Mabel herself would do with all this disorderly human emotion. Then I caught up, realizing that I also probably project too much from a bird that has never asked to be here.