Moving adaptation of Helen Macdonald’s bestselling memoir

When any “beloved work of literature” is made into a film, there’s always a “niggling worry” that the book will not be “fully realised” on screen, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. But happily, this adaptation of Helen Macdonald’s bestselling 2014 memoir does ample justice to its source material.

The film stars Claire Foy as Helen, an academic whose life falls apart when her photographer father (Brendan Gleeson) dies.

With her career derailing, she buys a goshawk she names Mabel, and becomes “obsessed” with the idea of training it. Her falconry buddy Stuart (Sam Spruell) has warned her that hawks are “perfectly evolved” psychopaths, but she starts to feel a deep connection with Mabel.

Foy, “who seems undaunted by having her face well within gouging distance” of the bird’s beak and claws, gives a “terrific, committed performance”, and the film cleverly “streamlines the multi-stranded structure of the book ... without diminishing its candour and emotional heft”.

The film is rather slow, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday, but “I liked it”. The flying sequences are “fabulous” – though you pity the rabbits and pheasants that get in Mabel’s way – and the ending is “unexpectedly lovely”.

“Foy is excellent”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator, and the film isn’t too “Hollywood”: there are no “flashes of sudden insight”, for instance. But I did find myself wondering, “is it right, keeping a wild animal captive”?

For a lot of the film, this “magnificent” bird just sits in Helen’s living room, “tethered to her perch, ankles in chains, wearing one of those creepy hoods that blocks all vision”. Macdonald’s story is told perfectly well, “but if you are #TeamMabel, your empathy may not be where the film wishes it to be”.

by Rachel Eliza Griffiths 

Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ memoir opens in 2021, on the day of her wedding to Salman Rushdie. “I am marrying a man that some people have deemed dangerous,” she writes. “What harm could find us on such a day?” One might assume that these “overt intimations of tragedy” refer to the attack on Rushdie 11 months later, in which he was stabbed 15 times and lost sight in his right eye, said Stephanie Merritt in The Observer. But “in fact, her account of the attack comes relatively late in the book, the greater part of which is concerned with the tragedy that preceded it – one that didn’t make international headlines”.

This is the death, from unknown causes, of her best friend and fellow poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who’d been expected at the wedding, but had “failed to turn up”. Only late on the day itself did Griffiths learn what happened, making it “the best and worst day of my life”. Her memoir – which is “preoccupied with death and trauma” while also being, at times, “surprisingly funny” – is an account of Griffiths’ “formation as a poet and artist, an evolution inseparable from her friendship” with Moon.

This is a “frank and disorientating memoir”, said Helen Brown in The Telegraph. It records the abuse Griffiths experienced as a child, and the depression and anxiety that hospitalised her several times in her 20s. Despite her desire to write, she “struggled to find the words to break through her numbness”. It was only after meeting Moon, while studying creative writing in New York, that she began to recognise her artistic talent. Infected with “literary madness”, the pair “exchanged stories of trauma”, bonded over the black writers they loved (Alice Walker, June Jordan, Lucille Clifton), drank too much and wrote poetry together, said Leigh Haber in The Washington Post. While others discouraged Griffiths from writing, “Moon cheered her on”. Now, in this “open wound of a memoir”, she has honoured the woman she came to regard as her “chosen sister”.

Griffiths also writes movingly of her relationship with Rushdie, whom she met in New York in 2017, said Fiona Sturges in The Guardian. While their early courtship is tinged with comedy – at their first meeting, he “collided with a plate-glass door that he thought was open” – their relationship becomes subsumed in the darker themes of the book. “Evocative” and “full-bodied”, if at times a “little overcooked”, “The Flower Bearers” is a “visceral depiction of violence, loss and emotional devastation” – but also a powerful “love story” and “portrait of sisterhood”.

Couturier who dressed Jackie Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor

Valentino Garavani was the last of the great 20th-century couturiers, said The New York Times. He founded his company in Rome just before the era of La Dolce Vita, and went on not only to dress princesses and movie stars – but to become their equal, “with his own palaces, movable court and signature shade of red”. Perma-tanned, “his hair blow-dried to immobile perfection”, and always known by his first name (or as Mr Valentino), he created a vision of high Italian glamour that he sold around the world. In the process, he paved the way for other Italian brands including Versace and Armani, and established himself as a national icon. “In Italy, there is the Pope – and there is Valentino,” Walter Veltroni, the then-mayor of Rome, told The New Yorker in 2005. 

He was born in Lombardy in 1932, the son of a well-off electrical wholesaler, and started to develop specific tastes early on, said The Telegraph. Aged six, he cried when his mother made him wear a “coarse” bow tie that ruined the effect of his navy suit; and in his teens, he asked to have his jumpers made to order, so that he could specify their pattern and colour. He decided to become a designer after seeing the “Ziegfeld Follies” (1945) and being entranced by the film’s extravagant costumes. His parents supported his ambition, and when he was 17 they arranged for him to study fashion in Milan, and later at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, in Paris. After several years of working for other couturiers, he opened his own studio in a fashionable neighbourhood of Rome in 1960. 

That year, he met Giancarlo Giammetti, an architecture student, at a café, who became his friend, lover (for a time) and business partner. “There are only three things I can do,” Valentino once said. “Make a dress, decorate a house, and entertain people.” Giammetti took care of everything else. In 1962, Valentino’s collection made a splash in Florence. Two years later, Jacqueline Kennedy bought six dresses from him, which she wore in mourning for her assassinated husband. This won him global recognition and a slew of other glamorous clients, from Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn to Queen Noor of Jordan. His all-white collection in 1968 found favour with the influential Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, and in the 1970s he launched his first eponymous perfume. Countless lucrative licensing deals followed. With money pouring in, he was able to remain based in Rome (rather than moving to the fashion capitals of Paris or Milan) – and to live in splendour. His homes, which he filled with priceless art and shared with his pet pugs and an entourage of friends, included a penthouse off Fifth Avenue, a villa on Rome’s Appian Way, a mansion in London’s Holland Park, a château in France, a hilltop estate in Tuscany, and a chalet in Gstaad. 

Valentino did not seek to reinvent himself, said The Times. His style evolved but his designs remained grounded in the “timeless elegance” of old Hollywood and “a specifically Italian ideal of womanhood”. Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lopez and Anne Hathaway were among his more recent celebrity clients. “Fashion is not so complex,” he said. “It is about making a woman beautiful. That and nothing else.” He and Giammetti finally sold the business in 1998, for $300 million (£217 million). His many awards included France’s Légion d’honneur. In 2008, he was the subject of a feature documentary entitled “The Last Emperor”. Following his death last week aged 93, 10,000 people queued to pay their respects while he lay in state in Rome. All the fashion world, from Donatella Versace and Tom Ford to Anna Wintour, then turned out for his funeral, where Giammetti delivered the eulogy. He is survived by Bruce Hoeksema, his partner of more than 40 years.