Dir: Jonathan Glazer | UK 38’
Joy of Joys: Jonathan Glazer finds the light in the darkest places in this star-studded musical gathering with a devastating sting in its tail.
Jonathan Glazer is hardly a director you’d associate with unbridled joy. Yet Joy of Joys, his 38-minute companion piece to War Child’s HELP(2) charity album, finds him exploring the fragile magic of childhood with a mixture of playfulness, visual ingenuity and quietly devastating purpose.
The star power is certainly there. Olivia Rodrigo, Arctic Monkeys, Damon Albarn, Jarvis Cocker, Beth Gibbons and an impressive roll-call of contemporary musical talent pass through the legendary Abbey Road Studios. But this isn’t your usual glossy, behind-the-scenes music documentary, with celebrity soundbites and artists congratulating one another on doing good. Glazer has something altogether more interesting in mind.
His inspired conceit is to hand cameras to London schoolchildren and let them roam among the musicians, capturing whatever catches their eye. The results are gloriously unpredictable: off-kilter angles, restless movement and the unfettered curiosity of young filmmakers discovering a world of musical celebrities. Glazer’s own precisely composed images provide a striking counterpoint, turning the familiar recording studio into a curious landscape of its own.
Then the film’s perspective shifts, and the real emotional force of the project emerges. Children in Sudan, Ukraine Gaza and Yemen have also been given cameras, recording fragments of their lives amid the devastation and uncertainty of conflict. The juxtaposition is both simple and potent: children everywhere share the same appetite for play, discovery and laughter, but not the same freedom to enjoy their childhoods in safety.
Glazer allows these images to speak for themselves, resisting the obvious sentimental shortcuts. Music becomes a bridge between radically different worlds, while the contrast between the ordered world of Abbey Road and the shattered environments elsewhere lends the film its unsettling charge. The visual approach is characteristically distinctive, even if the deliberately fragmented, child’s-eye perspective sometimes feels more suggestive than revealing.
There is, inevitably, a tension between the film’s artistic ambitions and its charitable mission. The impulse behind HELP(2) is unquestionably worthy, and the film’s appeal to our shared humanity is heartfelt. Yet its portrait of childhood can occasionally feel a little too neatly arranged to deliver its message. One might wish for greater depth and more time spent with the young people whose lives give the project its urgency.
Nevertheless, Joy of Joys has a genuine emotional pull. Rather than simply parading its musical stars, Glazer uses their presence to illuminate a much bigger question: what does it mean to preserve the possibility of joy when the adult world is so determined to destroy it?
Verdict: worth seeing. At just 38 minutes, this is a compact, visually inventive and often moving piece of cinema, made all the more affecting by the gulf between its title and the realities it reveals. It may not have the unsettling complexity of The Zone of Interest, but it demonstrates Glazer’s continuing ability to find an arresting cinematic language for difficult subjects. And if the film occasionally edges towards sentiment, the reality behind its images is anything but sentimental.
A small film with a big heart — and a reminder that protecting childhood should be the most obvious duty of all.
SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL