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Reviews
The Truth About Jane (2000)
Touching, but tries too hard to make its point
This movie has some very touching moments but it tries far too hard to make a point rather then allow the story and characters to develop on their own. By the end you wonder if you have been watching an educational film commissioned by PFLAG or some other self-help group for gay people.
It was made two years after the release of Lukas Moodysson's astonishing "Show me Love" which also deals with a love affair between two teenage girls of different social backgrounds, the homophobic behaviour of classmates and the reaction of the seemingly liberal and supportive parents of one of the girls. I wonder if the director was aware of Moodysson's work? I fear this film suffers badly by comparison.
Morte a Venezia (1971)
Read Mann's book and listen to Mahler's 5th Symphony. Then watch the film.
I first saw this film in about 1976 aged 16 or 17 and was astonished by it. I hadn't then read the book and although I knew some Mahler I wasn't familiar with the 5th Symphony, much used in the soundtrack. So strong is the visual imagery that it took me a long time to be able to appreciate those other two masterpieces without seeing Visconti's images.
The film is certainly allegorical but it would be wrong to see it, or the book, as wholly so. It is now well known that Mann based his story on real events in his own life.
Mann, like Benjamin Britten who composed an opera based on the story at about the same time as the film was made, understood only too well the inextricable link between the seeming purity of feelings of love and the defilement of lust associated with a man's obsession with a beautiful pre-pubescent boy. Both Mann and Britten succeeded in using these tensions in their own very different ways to create great works of art.
Visconti's film is a very fine achievement but is not true to the book in one important respect: Tadzio, at sixteen, is too old. Mann's real Tadzio - also Polish - was only eleven years old and the character in his book was fourteen. As a consequence the film does not quite ring true. Von Aschenbach is made to seem like a repressed homosexual rather than someone who loves young boys but not grown men - a condition as impossible and unfulfillable then as it would be today. Visconti's own homosexuality had got in the way I suspect.
If.... (1968)
A Masterpiece which in spite of itself has survived the test of time.
I first saw this film aged about 16 or 17 on television in a packed room at my school which was not unlike the one satirised by it. I initially hated the ending and despised the character of Travis. With not a little adolescent self-loathing, and being at the time infatuated with a boy of Bobby Phillips's age who exuded a similar aura of gorgeousness, I saw myself in Denson, the bigoted pro-establishment whip licking the foam from his lips as he gazes longingly at the young boy who is shaving him.
Beatings by prefects had been abolished shortly before I arrived, our dress and customs were not quite so formal and there was a rather less pro-establishment feel, yet the film caught the essence of that type of school like no other. However I didn't come away fuelled with hatred for the established order as Anderson no doubt wanted; my only acts of rebellion after seeing the film were to buy a shaving brush and a dress shirt with a wing collar several years before they had come back in fashion. Instead I wished I had been there. The school's hellish oppressiveness and vulgarity had only served to heighten for me the love between Wallace and Phillips, so briefly hinted at, which seemed to me then the most beautiful thing in the world. Of course more recent films have, in very different styles and settings, covered this territory much more thoroughly, especially the wonderful F**king Amal.
Watching the film again some thirty five years later many feelings were the same, but this time I was utterly charmed by McDowell's performance as Travis and I found much more humour. The revolutionary plot instead of feeling threatening now seemed rather childish, no longer a call to arms in the real world but rather a violent fantasy as a metaphor for the inner conflict of adolescence. This ambiguity (intended or not), the charm, the humour and the razor sharp satire of a lost, crueler yet in many ways more innocent world make this a lasting masterpiece.
Fucking Åmål (1998)
Achingly beautiful
I came across this film entirely by chance. So far I have only seen it in fragmentary form on Youtube but I am completely in love with it (my CD is on order). Others here have already described it much more eloquently than I ever could so I won't attempt a synopsis.
My adolescent years in a traditional English boys' boarding school in the early 70s could hardly have been more different from small town Sweden yet I identified completely with lonely, beautiful, shy Agnes - so adored and cared for by her understanding parents but so unhappy with her lot, misunderstood and mocked by her petty foul-mouthed schoolmates, yearning for an impossible love.
For me Lindsay Anderson's "If...." (1968) has always been the defining movie of my adolescence for its exaggerated, satirical portrait of public school life. That film touches very briefly on the love boys could have for each other but does not explore the territory; love which seemed at the time so perfect and pure, transcending the surrounding cruelty and vulgarity, made all the more poignant by its forbidden nature and the ostracism it entailed. F***ing Amal fills that gap and belongs up there with Anderson's masterpiece.
My favourite moments are not the obvious ones of the kissing scene or the dream sequence, but the sight of Agnes' tear stained face as she types her thoughts into her computer and her quiet nod of assent in the cubicle. The ending is uplifting but I was left with doubts. Would Elin really have had the courage to do this? Is it just a passing whim for her? Perhaps that is why the film is made to end so quickly. The perfect moment had been arrived at and bliss like this can never be sustained, or perhaps ever repeated.