On the Black Hill

Clearly, the identical twins Benjamin and Lewis are not identical twins. If one stretched the imagination, they could be seen as fraternal twins, but that's pushing it. One is much older than the other.

Of the actors who play the adult brothers, the award for Best Actor would surely go to the shorter of the two, even though he seems much too old for the part. He has a subtlety that the taller, younger-appearing actor does not. He can change his expression and demeanor without moving a muscle in his face or body, while the taller one manufactures expression.

This movie is rather hard to follow, at times.

From the UK. The first thing we see is a passage from revelations. Followed by a family in church. So much religion! Stars mike and robert gwilym, as welsh twins lewis and benjamin, and their lives. The first hour is just growing up as kids, with an unpredictable father. Kind of a wasted hour... didn't really need to spend that much time on how their parents met. When one brother is sent off to war, they both suffer, in separation, and their gentle, non-violent beliefs. We see many samples of their pain and suffering. After the war, they get rich and successul, but as one of them points out, they have no heir to whom they can leave it. Gotta be honest... not a lot happens in this one hour fifty one minute film. I was hoping for more drama, but if you were wondering what life was like in wales, from 1900 to 1950, this is your film. I guess it shows the friendship between brothers. Directed by andrew grieve. Mike gwilym only made one more film after this, but robert was still acting as recently as 2019.

Without pretensions of being anything other than what it is, which is a thoroughly grounded adaptation of Bruce Chatwin's novel of life in the Welsh borders across 80 years of the twentieth century, through the experiences of a Welsh hill farmer, an English lady and their twin sons, this is a thoroughly engaging portrait that brings the place and its people to life. The filmmakers had a low budget, but plenty of time to get things right, so the locations - from just north of Brecon across to the Black Mountains, with scenes in Hay-on-Wye and Crickhowell - are perfect, and with props and furniture borrowed from people and houses in the area, there is an authentic sense of place here. Director Andrew Grieve was brought up in mid Wales, so has a real feel for the area too, and has made one of the surprisingly few British films in which the landscape of Britain is filmed with an understanding of the role it plays in people's daily lives.

A slow burner for sure, but one of the films I saw as a teenager, along with Life is Sweet, Boys from the Blackstuff, that had the same feeling of taking you into different lives, different cultures, and ways of thinking that are , for better or worse, no more than nostalgia.

It's not an uplifting film at first watch, but the sensitivity it deploys without the expense of becoming sentimental is beautiful. The landscape is brutal and barely productive, but the attachment of the family to it is mirrored in the attachment of the brothers to each other and their father's legacy.

I hope the BFI ensure this is preserved in their archives, it's surely worth it.

Not unlike the distant Welsh valley where it was filmed, this screen adaptation of Bruce Chatwin's novel can be a little too remote at times, but it captures the insular life of an old Welsh farm with vivid austerity. In just under two hours the film spans over eighty years in the lives of identical twin brothers, born into a century which seems to happen somewhere over the distant horizon (their closest involvement with the Second World War is watching the glow on the skyline of Coventry burning during the Blitz). The film offers a challenging vision of continuity between successive generations of a family tied (for better or worse) to the land, but the episodic, hopscotch approach effectively (deliberately?) forestalls any dramatic momentum, and no matter how eloquently expressed the stark isolation of the twins' life together is often cold and depressing.