من الأشهر اليوم؟

The film has been panned, and I was worried by the geopolitical faux pas in the opening scenes. But Thompson’s performance was thrillingly familiar
We had a family cinema trip this week to see Last Christmas, a film most disparagingly reviewed. I scorn poor reviews. I have had so many myself that to do anything other than scorn them would give weight to some very unkind things said about me. My mum has got a hit list of critics, who would be well advised to watch their backs at all times. There’s an element of hypocrisy in her loathing, though: she used to love the venomous prose of the late AA Gill, for example, but when one Sunday he emptied his poisoned pen eviscerating me, everything changed. He went from being one of her favourite writers to one of her least favourite human beings of all time. My mum is very Croatian, you see, and the kind of volatility demonstrated in that screeching about-turn is very, well, Croatian.
Last Christmas, as you may know, features Emma Thompson playing a Croatian mother. And this we had to see. As early as the first frames of the film, I was beginning to wonder if I should have heeded the reviews. We saw a girl singing in a church choir, and up came the caption, Yugoslavia 1999. I hate to be picky, but Yugoslavia had torn itself to pieces by 1999. By then the federal republic consisted only of Serbia and Montenegro, and definitely not Croatia. I was worried this geopolitical faux pas might see rotten tomatoes spattering screens in my mother country, but sources in Zagreb report no peltings thus far. Continue reading...