Hamnet and H Is for Hawk fuse themes of loss, birds and elemental female emotion. But whose fault is it if you remain dry-eyed?
‘I
s it porn or is it art?” A familiar, even dated question where nudity is involved, and (forgive thumbnail) pretty well-resolved– which is to say: we let the tastemakers decide, and it tips the scale towards “art” if one or both protagonists are not that good-looking.
“Is it grief-porn or is it grief-art?” is a more vexed question. Grief-porn, in relation to cinema, would suggest that the film in question is emotionally manipulative, formulaic; grief-art would suggest the film unleashes feelings both universal and true.
It’s curiously circular. In a film about grief, the valorised quality is depth of feeling; it stands or falls by how profoundly the hero(ine) experiences emotion, and the audience proves its acuity, buys itself into the imaginative contract, by its ability to mirror that profundity. You only get to decide whether it’s art if you’re already feeling it so deeply that it must be, in other words. If the death left you cold and you found the ensuing emotionality manipulative and domineering, this logic is quite annoying.
