the best film i've seen on growing up
So many moments in this film struck a chord with me. As a grammar
school student applying for Oxbridge, I have to disagree with the previous reviewer. The worries and pressures, as well as the arrogance, humour (and sheer smart-aleckness) that surround the boys' dialogue perfectly capture the hilarity and torture of adolescence. The dialogue is a little stage-y, but that doesn't seriously tarnish its impact. I think this film expresses the uncertainty and risk involved in life in a way that is both poignant and witty; often both at the same time. Ideas about what education should really be could not be more beautifully expressed than in this picture of young boys with their whole lives stretched out in front of them, and old teachers still unsure of what it's all about. Subtle and brilliant.. 
Avoid
Lashings of literary quotations, francophone banter and one-liners atop
a dialog based on epithets probably give it artistic merit to some minds and if you are a gay and/or terminally jaundiced and world-weary teacher it may well have some meaning for you. For the other 99.9% of humanity, this is a thinly-disguised rose-colored vanguard for destigmatising man-boy love and as such is odious and disingenuous. We all know that teenage boys are obsessed with sex but to suggest that so many are actively homo/bi/curious is just wishful thinking on someone's part. The preoccupation with sex on the part of the adults as well gives greater insight into the writer and directors' minds as epitomized in a scene where one of the boys on being rebuffed by a gay teacher gives some tart comment to the effect that "you are really daring when it comes to talking and thinking but something real happens, you get all cautious"(paraphrased). So, in this film, sex (specifically gay sex) is more 'real' than all the puffery about the value of education that it otherwise pontificates on. A curious perspective but one I am very glad to not share. To add tedium to odium, it is also badly made. Star turns by the three adult leads were the only thing that kept me seated but were not enough to rescue this turkey. There are numerous technical flaws as noted elsewhere, the contrived ending is cringingly gauche and the headmaster character races past clich. |
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