A Film Canon

Blimp satirises those misperceptions bound up in protagonist Clive Candy's (Roger Livesey) application of lessons learned in the Boer War to WWII; that is, in his assumption that war can still be (or ever could be) conducted as a mere extension of gentlemanship. To this end, Powell and Pressburger take ceremony to the verge of chaos, as evinced in their taste for mistranslations and miscommunications, confusions between diplomatic and military boundaries, ridiculous proliferations of codes and criteria, and, above all, units of people moving in hyperactive, or at least eccentric, tandem - both spatially and historically. In the same way, they identify an astonishing, pastel Technicolour palette with a variety of exotic cultural spectacles (classical music, ballet, Turkish baths), only to re-apply it to the trenches, producing a lurid incongruity that encapsulates a character's reflection that "it's queer...for years and years, they're writing and dreaming - beautiful music, beautiful poetry. All of a sudden they start a war. They sink undefended ships, shoot innocent hostages...and then they sit down in the same butcher's uniform and listen to Mendelssohn and Schubert. There's something horrid about that." That said, this horror retains a fairly understated - if pervasive - presence, such that the ultimate impression is almost that of a middle-class comedy of manners, albeit with an unsettling, elusive surplus. Among other things, this provides the directors with the space to evoke that exquisitely painful deja vu that seems to have been the hallmark of the inter-war period - most explicitly in Deborah Kerr's portrayal of three generations of women, but most poetically in the final filtration of a flooded bomb site through the romanticism that suffuses their subsequent collaborations.