Hunky Dory.
The visionary film.
Actually not so visionary as it purports to be based on a true story. So I'm not two years (well, eighteen months) ahead of my time but in fact, 34 years late.
I was predisposed to like this film. A story about a sweetly well meaning (teacher) girl who ropes a ramshackle collection of (young) people into putting on a version of The Tempest punctuated with pop songs. How was I ever not going to have fallen for it way before opening credits slid across the screen?
But I liked it so much that I can't even tell whether it was a good film or not.
I was lost from the second that the crowd of ramshackle (young) people launched into (think it was) this.
As this, for ever after, will make me think of the most marvellous moment at the RSC workshop last summer when The Actors were groomed by The Teachers to sing to The 'Directors'. And it was one of the most spine tingly moments of my life. (Even though I hated the workshop itself so much that I still can't bring myself to mention it here for fear of seeming ungrateful.)
Diversions aside, this Hunky Dory is no different to any other film charting the ascent of a pack of unprepossessing trouble-wrought Youth. There are so many of them. In this, the transformative power of (insert noun) theatre is used to overhaul their petty but personally individually tragic lives and make them realise that They Can Be Better Than They Are. Even if only for one night.
It's beautifully shot. Sun soaked. Nice attention to detail with the stonking suede knee high pastel boots and tank tops and pointy collars and polyester. Wales in 1976 and The Young are beeeautiful.
Minnie is probably a bit old to be playing the sweet well-intentioned but quietly bohemian (she drinks sherry! Shock! not as an aperitif! Greater shock) expressionist (discipline never really specified) teacher. Certainly she's substantially older than her 'cool' housemates. But this doesn't matter. Perhaps Minnie is the age of The Real Woman.
The kids are all of that lovely nubile 25-playing-14 looking age. The lead boy has a face like Michelangelo's David. The lead girl looks - well, Nabokov wouldn't have objected.
The director has possibly struggled slightly to eke out the story to fill the time. Or maybe that's really unkind. Maybe the dwelling shots of children's hands sawing at childsize instruments were celebrating the talent of the innocent.
The story strains into cliché now and again. The absent mother. The shambolic dad struggling to hold it together. The sultry French. The lumpen loafish oaf PE teacher who verges on / is a terrible bully. The child that can't come out. Oh but then he does and it's all fine. The shaven headed boy who turns out to be the worst of all of them - oh but does he?
None of this story is new. But if you want a cosy pair of pyjamas on a beach flooded with gently warming sun of a film, you could do worse.
Ferdinand - Michelangelo boy - winds up in a baby David Bowie jacket atop some sort of tree singing a - presumably - David Bowie song after Prospero has trilled his last 'little lives are rounded in a sleep'. And it was quite quite magic.
If you're B S Neill, you'll be disparaging from fifteen minutes in, I reckon. If you're cmf or Cari, I reckon you'll be enchanted.
The visionary film.
Actually not so visionary as it purports to be based on a true story. So I'm not two years (well, eighteen months) ahead of my time but in fact, 34 years late.
I was predisposed to like this film. A story about a sweetly well meaning (teacher) girl who ropes a ramshackle collection of (young) people into putting on a version of The Tempest punctuated with pop songs. How was I ever not going to have fallen for it way before opening credits slid across the screen?
But I liked it so much that I can't even tell whether it was a good film or not.
I was lost from the second that the crowd of ramshackle (young) people launched into (think it was) this.
As this, for ever after, will make me think of the most marvellous moment at the RSC workshop last summer when The Actors were groomed by The Teachers to sing to The 'Directors'. And it was one of the most spine tingly moments of my life. (Even though I hated the workshop itself so much that I still can't bring myself to mention it here for fear of seeming ungrateful.)
Diversions aside, this Hunky Dory is no different to any other film charting the ascent of a pack of unprepossessing trouble-wrought Youth. There are so many of them. In this, the transformative power of (insert noun) theatre is used to overhaul their petty but personally individually tragic lives and make them realise that They Can Be Better Than They Are. Even if only for one night.
It's beautifully shot. Sun soaked. Nice attention to detail with the stonking suede knee high pastel boots and tank tops and pointy collars and polyester. Wales in 1976 and The Young are beeeautiful.
Minnie is probably a bit old to be playing the sweet well-intentioned but quietly bohemian (she drinks sherry! Shock! not as an aperitif! Greater shock) expressionist (discipline never really specified) teacher. Certainly she's substantially older than her 'cool' housemates. But this doesn't matter. Perhaps Minnie is the age of The Real Woman.
The kids are all of that lovely nubile 25-playing-14 looking age. The lead boy has a face like Michelangelo's David. The lead girl looks - well, Nabokov wouldn't have objected.
The director has possibly struggled slightly to eke out the story to fill the time. Or maybe that's really unkind. Maybe the dwelling shots of children's hands sawing at childsize instruments were celebrating the talent of the innocent.
The story strains into cliché now and again. The absent mother. The shambolic dad struggling to hold it together. The sultry French. The lumpen loafish oaf PE teacher who verges on / is a terrible bully. The child that can't come out. Oh but then he does and it's all fine. The shaven headed boy who turns out to be the worst of all of them - oh but does he?
None of this story is new. But if you want a cosy pair of pyjamas on a beach flooded with gently warming sun of a film, you could do worse.
Ferdinand - Michelangelo boy - winds up in a baby David Bowie jacket atop some sort of tree singing a - presumably - David Bowie song after Prospero has trilled his last 'little lives are rounded in a sleep'. And it was quite quite magic.
If you're B S Neill, you'll be disparaging from fifteen minutes in, I reckon. If you're cmf or Cari, I reckon you'll be enchanted.
posted by Claire at 10:35 pm
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