Moderato Cantabile

Ah, the decadence of a Bank Holiday morning, lying in bed on a day when you'd normally be at work. Bliss. My mum would have been 82 today, she wouldn't have liked that.

In fact I dozed rather than slept from around five onwards. When Laurence is on a late shift I like to hear some sounds from him when he comes in, the comfort of knowing he's safely home, but last night, no sounds. He was however home, I could have saved myself the wondering by going down and checking that his bike was there.

The last couple of rainy days, we have watched two films on DVD that contrasted rather starkly with Thursday's cinema offering.

The first, 'Notes on a Scandal', Alex told me to see some time ago, but this was the first week it was in the video store.
Dame Judi at full throttle, wonderful after the rather first gear Mrs. Henderson and well matched by Cate Blanchett. A slow burning story of self-destruction, a ponderous but inexorable train crash that we can see coming but are hypnotised by.
Blanchett's Sheba, beautiful, unconsciously sensual, her strength sapped by the neediness of those around her and ultimately judged by those whose needs she could no longer meet.

Dench's Barbara one of the needy, but predatory too, a reminder of the powerful destructiveness of suppressing human sexuality .... and of how necessary cats are.

The second film, 'The History Boys' was a filmed version of Alan Bennett's stage play of the same name. And thus the dialogue is not the realistic speech of good cinema, but the gentle discourse between Bennett and his audience's experience.

The moment, the pure intellectual pleasure of a term's work for Oxbridge entrance when A-levels had already been secured.
Taught and tutored by the finest, richest minds, whilst reminded that in their own heads, none of these teachers had made the Oxbridge grade.
Frances de la Tour's Mrs. Lintott had gone to Durham, Stephen Campbell Moore's Irwin to Bristol, both arguably more difficult to get into than Oxbridge in any case.
An unease which echoes the discomfort of grammar school boys trying for places at Universities still largely populated at that time by the Public Schools.

These boys both studied and yet were a moment in history.

The barely concealed homosexuality of Richard Griffiths's Hector is accepted by the boys. They buy into the richness of his teaching, the little scenarios they create in atrociously pronounced French, the cameos from films, plays, musicals, casually enacted in Hector's classroom. They are complicit because the power is theirs and they support each other, no boy reproaching another for his difference.
Everything just is as it is for that snapshot moment in their own history.

My only niggle was that in spite of Hector's frequent lessons on the wonders of the subjunctive mood, when it is called for in English, Bennett casts it aside, allowing the indicative to jar.

I enjoyed every moment of this film, I could hear Alan Bennett's voice in every line. But I went to grammar school, I loved the intellectual challenge and the enriching experience of great teachers, the more so in retrospect. And the moment was almost, but not quite, my own moment in history.
To me the film was like having a magnificent picnic in a cornfield full of harebells on a warm summer's day. Would it hold anything for a wider audience?

The proof of the pudding and all that.