Breakwater review – troubled souls cross class and age barriers in nicely judged debut feature

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An Oxford theology student and a middle-aged fisher are drawn together despite their many differences in an ambitious first film from Max Morgan This evocative debut feature from Max Morgan is a film of many contrasts. One is the May-December attraction between Otto (Daniel McNamee), a theology student and aspiring violinist, and John (Shaun Paul McGrath), a middle-aged fisher with a shadowy past. The worlds that they inhabit seem poles apart. Compared with the storm-ravaged Suffolk coast that curves around John’s rugged village, the imposing halls of Otto’s college at Oxford are at once grand and isolating. Despite their differences in age, the two men are bound by shared trauma and turmoil: both struggle with their sexuality and the loss of a loved one. The highly textured cinematography renders these inner conflicts strikingly tactile. The camera at times stays uncomfortably close to the main characters, highlighting the gnawing anxiety of not belonging. From the demands of a frustr...
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Donald Sutherland was an irreplaceable aristocrat of cinema

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The late actor was a commanding and versatile presence on the big screen, perfecting everything from villainy to sensuality in films such as Don’t Look Now and Klute

Donald Sutherland was an utterly unique actor and irreplacable star: possessed of a distinctive leonine handsomeness that the white beard of his latter years only made more majestic: watchful, cerebral, charismatic, with a refinement to his screen acting technique comparable perhaps only to Paul Scofield and his Canadian background (together with his early stage training and experience in England and Scotland) gave his American roles a certain touch of Anglo-international class. Sutherland was commanding and exacting, he gave each of his roles and films something special: he addressed his co-stars and the camera itself from a position of strength.

Even playing a weak or absurd character, as he did starring as the preposterous womaniser in Federico Fellini’s Casanova in 1976, finally reduced to the job of a librarian in a German count’s castle, brooding grotesquely over the phantoms of past lovers, Sutherland was still strong, still mesmeric, his intelligent face still sympathetic as Casanova, even though resembling a non-priapic gargoyle. For Bertolucci in his Italian epic 1900, he played an actual fascist, the gruesomely named Attila, and though certainly very far from sympathetic, he played the role with a sickeningly twinkle-eyed dynamism.

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