aligned with...Things to Come

This is truly an escapist indulgent recognition of one woman's multiple midlife challenges. Because it is set in France, it is both believable and enjoyable in every aesthetic detail. We enter the world of intellectuals living in book lined apartments, with amazing linen clothing. This film, L'Avenir, translated as Things to come, has deservedly won the best director for Mia Hansen-Love at the 2016 Berlinale. It is an empowering film of the recreation of life from the pieces left in middle age...

Nathalie, played brilliantly by Isabelle Huppert, teaches philosophy to idealist and somewhat anarchistic Parisian teenagers. At home, she holds her 2 teenagers together with a distracted husband, and tends to her despairing drama queen mother. But her first bombshell reveals that her husband of 25 years is leaving her for a younger woman. She and Heinz are both philosophy teachers and books have been their bond; and the reason why she had thought he would always love her. "How naive of me," she reflects with resignation rather than bitterness.

Another challenge is brewing, in that her publishers drop her intellectual work from their list because she's neither young nor hip enough to suit their new marketing plan. And then her mother dies, through succumbing to the depression that has haunted her for years. Nathalie also realises that while she was once a radical, her students are challenging her bourgeoise life. She has to recognise that one of her star students has grown beyond her, to the point of being critical of what she stands for. She does not wallow in self-pity, but rather relies on her intellect in the midst of the ultimate unfairness around her. One of my favourite lines is “I’m lucky to be fulfilled intellectually — that’s reason enough to be happy”. Nathalie does not need to find another partner to be fulfilled, and is in fact very alone in many of the dark nights both literally and figuratively. Somehow, in her solitude, she finds her freedom, but without those she thought she might share it with. Finally, the film provides a sense of hope through her emotional limbo; “So long as we desire, we can do without happiness". Somehow she finds strength in her vulnerability. And in this french genre, it is so utterly believable and strangely enjoyable.

Nostalgic and questioning...the Sense of an Ending

This film questions our personal meaning of life by comparing our remembered past with the stories we shape from it. We enjoy a wonderful snapshot of contemporary London contrasted against memories of school and university life in the 60's. We are challenged to test the veracity of our remembered life story, with others' memories and external objects of verification. Does time tinge our memories? Do we ever fully understand the consequences of our earlier actions. The Sense of an Ending is based on the 2011 Man Booker Prize-winning novel by Julian Barnes. It contrasts how we live, with how we live to regret. The excellent British cast is led by Jim Broadbent (Tony Webster) and includes Charlotte Rampling (first love Veronica) and Harriet Walter (ex-wife Margaret). Tony and his friends first meet the new boy Adrian at their Etonian type school. In a history lesson Adrian responds with the films' guiding message “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation". Believing they would be friends for life, the boys navigate parties and girls and it is not long until we realise that Tony loses his first girlfriend Veronica, to Adrian. Tony’s current life alters when he learns that he has inherited Adrian's diary, as part of the inheritance of Veronica's mother! We follow him around London in search of the diary and he surprises his ex-wife Margaret with stories she has never heard. The only part of the diary he receives from Veronica is a spiteful letter he once wrote and Tony needs to unravel various incidents from long ago. Finally, as he becomes a grandfather, he realises the importance of valuing what he has, in his ex wife, daughter and grandson.

Helen Garner's The first stone - over 20 years later

I was living in England when the event in 1992 occurred and was not that interested in reading this book when it was published in 1995. Now, more than 20 years on, I was handed the book, as an interesting read, by a trusted book clubber. I was therefore quite naive about what I was reading! The First Stone opens to the police interview of the Master of Ormond College, in relation to sexual harassment charges made by two students during a fairly jovial party after their valedictory dinner. It seems there was a delay before the girls reported the incident to the college and then the police. Despite being acquitted on two occasions, the Master resigned in disgrace without future career options. It seems that Helen was a critical observer to a highly charged and divisive situation - and she wanted to find out more about the motives of the key players. She wrote to the Master of Ormond, named by her as Colin Shepherd, and received some insights into his family life and career. She tried to interview the two girls, without success, and many people have since accused her of writing an anti-feminist story, and 20 years later, are still doing so! I am quite bemused because the story to me was so much more about power and class then merely gender. Ormond was a replica Oxbridge college that had recently modernised as a co-ed college. Sometimes Australians are more critical of class than the English themselves, who seem to accept it as part of life. While in many ways Australia is a classless society and there are multiple opportunities for self-improvement, there are still bastions of the English class system that are even more entrenched than in the motherland. Perhaps the University of Melbourne is one of them! So, for me, it seemed that Colin had tried too hard to be the congenial, compassionate and egalitarian Master in a hierarchical and historical class system. Somehow, the girls and their secret supporters fought a nasty and public battle where they moved around the classic victim's triangle, from victim to persecutor and then to rescuer. Along the way they gathered support from feminists, lawyers and the academic establishment. At no time, was there any sense to question the Master's actions apart from assumptions of evil intent. This is what has scared me the most. In gender and politics, there are many grey areas, where with some patience and compassion, individual behaviours can be understood, rather than escalated. I think Helen tried to bring this out in her book, by describing stories where most women have managed advances from men, that while flattering may have been unwanted. In many ways, the success of women is built upon their ability to do this with some respect for themselves and for the other person. Further, there is always a decision to escalate and that concerns me the most. Normally, in escalation we are seeking a higher level of moral conscience. Perhaps we are looking for exoneration for ourselves and punishment or at least acknowledgment by others. Helen and myself, as her reader, seem ignorant of when and why the decision to escalate was made. I think in trying to understand this, she was accused of being anti-feminist. But it seems to me, that the feminists were selling themselves out to the establishment and expecting the law to enact gender equality in one of the most inequitable corners of Australian civilisation. Garner reflectively questioned why the girls delayed their accusations, why they joined forces and whether they really had taken responsibility for their own behaviours. To me this seemed appropriate but to the feminists it was proclaimed outrageous. I really wonder whether the girls innocence and naivety was played by the feminist card. I saw a similarity to whistleblowers in office politics, where they try and use anti-bullying policies. In both situations, playing the victim, even with a sense of moral rightness, does not pay. No matter how civilised our society, we cannot legislate for fairness between sexes, classes or even managerial behaviours. Reading this book has really emphasised to me, the need for all players in any situation of real or perceived conflict, to carefully review their own contribution to the situation and to decide to act with power and responsibility. I accept that in some situations this is very difficult to do, because of significant power imbalances and altered perceptions. However, I wonder what would have happened if the girls had been coached to reflect on what had happened, facilitated to question the intention of their Master and then decided to behave differently.

Moonlight - a tale of sympathetic dichotomies

I cannot say that Moonlight was in my top 10 movies to see this year - but having won an Oscar for best picture, I thought it would be worth seeing - so I joined my usual arty meet up group on Sunday afternoon. I must admit that I was quite tired walking in, having read my book over lunch time and I was perhaps a bit too relaxed to fully get into this movie. It is quite slow and sometimes tedious as we meet the young black school boy Chiron, who is very introspective. He seems both vulnerable and shy and it takes us a while to begin to understand. His mother is seeking escape through drugs and it is not clear whether he is being bullied or that he just does not fit in. I am not sure that I would have picked up his sexuality issues if I did not know - he seemed genuinely unsure as a school boy and even a teenager about why he did not fit in with his friends. This may have become more difficult as he befriended Juan, his mother's drug dealer, and they had an almost father - son relationship. There were perhaps a few too many contradictions and inconsistencies, but I guess that might just be life as experienced by a fragile gay boy in the testosterone driven black drug scene. It is almost inevitable that he joined those who destroyed his mother's life, but the ending does hold out some hope, if you are feeling positively inspired....

captivated by India Between the Assassinations

This second book by the Man Booker-winning author Aravind Adiga, is written as a travel guide of short stories within a fictional Indian town of Kittur, between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and her son Rajiv in 1991. Over one week, the reader is taken to all the important areas and introduced to everyday individuals who are trying to eek out a living within the cultural mixing pot of traditional and post-colonial India. At first, the cultural complexity seems to be the key point of difference; the caste system, the blatant corruption, abject poverty and the arrogance of wealth. But slowly each story tells of the eternal human struggle, to be the best person you can, amidst the universal apathy, greed and despair. And in tune, the complex physical surroundings are carefully described as being anything between strikingly beautiful and pungently filthy. Minute details are explained so that it is easy to feel as though you are there in the middle of it all, with an understanding of why things happen the way they do... Kittur symbolises the universal crossroads of our civilisation, between naive enthusiasm and endemic corruption, the brightest, most educated and those unable to read, the downtrodden and greedy, and the crazy rich and unimaginably poor; all within the spiritual and cultural complexity of modern day India. We meet upper-caste bankers and lower-caste rickshaw pullers, Muslim tea boys and Christian headmasters, capitalist factory owners and communist sidekicks. Each character has their own story which gradually emerges. First of all we meet 12 year old Ziauddin, one of "those lean lonely men with vivid eyes who haunt every train station in India". Then there is Ramakrishna "Xerox", who has been arrested 21 times for selling illegally photocopied books to students; Shankara, the mixed-caste Brahmin-Hoyka student, who sources products from the underworld to set off a bomb in a Jesuit school to protest against the caste system; Abbasi, the idealistic shirt factory owner, who offers drinks laced with his own shit to corrupt government officials; Mr D'Mello, an assistant headmaster who desperately tried to keep his favourite student away from the pornographic cinema in the middle of town; Ratnakara Shetty, the fake sexologist, who sets out to find a cure for a young boy with venereal disease; the Raos, a childless couple who seek refuge within the forested outskirts of the town and their own circle of social intelligentsia who cannot help mocking them; Keshava, the village boy who achieves his aspiration to become a bus conductor; Gururaj Kamath, the newspaper columnist who incessantly "looks for the truth"; Chenayya, the cycle-cart puller who "could not respect a man in whom there was no rebellion"; Soumya and Raju, the beggar children on a mission to buy smack for their drug-addict father; Jayamma, the sixth daughter for whom her Brahmin father could not afford a dowry, who seeks comfort in DDT fumes; George D'Souza, a mosquito-repellant sprayer who systematically elevates himself to gardener, then chauffeur of a lonely rich Mrs Gomes, before he loses it all by trying to be someone else; and Murali, the loneliest member of the Marxist-Maoist communist party who falls in love with the poorest young woman in dire circumstances. He cannot afford to marry her and must concentrate on developing his skill for writing stories about real people who want nothing. The book is a compulsive read, if only for a sense of hope at the end. Perhaps the resounding message is the simplest, to appreciate what we have...

travelling with the surreal Passengers

I felt the need to escape reality and chose to see this romantic sci-fi drama of a spaceship full of frozen people heading off to start a new life. It was a combination of a futuristic space machine and a super tech cruise ship, with 5000 passengers in suspended animation for 120 years. As if we could ever get that technical accuracy! But the movie did not disappoint. It was entertaining in every way. The meteor hits and Jim (Chris Pratt) is awakened 90 years too early. Despite using his engineering skills to exploit every luxury on board, he becomes very lonely and bored and he is challenged to wake up the lovely Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence). His dilemma is shared with the android and very humanoid barman. There is quite a charming moral story about the fact that we can't always have what we want, and if we do, then we can't recognise or appreciate it until its too late, or almost too late! There are some brilliant visual effects of a swimming pool that bubbles out into space and the idea of a corporation running this scale of tourism is quite quirky.

The myth of Jackie

I was uncertain about seeing the film Jackie; would it be a historical documentary, a piece of american propaganda or something more than that? I should have realised that the Chilean director, Pablo Larrain, would not have grown up in America, surrounded by the Kennedy myth. Instead, he created a visual and emotional masterpiece, that covered the first few days after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, in November 1963. Jackie Kennedy was being interviewed for her lived experience and we were transported back to key events. She introduced the Camelot myth – in which he was an old-fashioned but tragic hero. But in reality she must have been in shock, some say PTSD, and was trying to honour her husband and country and be a mother to their 2 young children. The film has an amazingly discordant sound track contrasted by beautiful dresses and set design. Natalie Portman plays the emotions honestly and believably, and as she communicates with the priest, played by haunting and elderly John Hurt, she displays both her determination and vulnerability.

magical: All the light we cannot see

This novel offers a brilliant life affirming reading experience. It is a magnificent feat of creativity inspired by research for the multiple award-winning author Anthony Doerr. It is such an intricate weave of 2 young lives in 1940's Europe; a resilient blind French girl and a smart German orphan, whose life paths move towards their fleeting meeting in occupied St Malo at the end of World War II. They are both so amazingly strong and adept at surviving through challenges most of us would never consider possible. Before the war, Marie-Laure lives with her widowed father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master lock smith. She is blinded at six and her father whittles a wooden miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. At twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and she flees with her father to the walled Saint-Malo, to the sanctuary of her reclusive great-uncle. They carry with them what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous diamond; even they do not know if it is real or one of the 3 fakes created to deter the Germans. At the same time, in a northern German mining town, Werner grows up with his younger sister in an isolated orphanage. He seeks escape through his fascination with and skills in repairing radios. While he is excited to earn a place at an elite training academy, his sister has premonitions of its futility. As he tracks the resistance, Werner realises the human cost of his intelligence. The sensitivity of the meeting between Werner and Marie-Laure at the final stages of the war is truly tragically romantic. And in the final few chapters, it is wonderful to read forward to current times and realise the intergenerational beauty of such an amazing connection. There can be goodwill created in the most dire of circumstances.