Puberty Blues is a well known coming-of-age novel set in Cronulla (yes, the riot suburb) which has been rebooted for a new generation and is presently screening in Australia. In spite of its relative slowness for our times - its been pretty much set to a 70s pace - perhaps nostalgia and the persistent popularity of the coming of age novel has meant that the show has been a success. Despite it primarily being a novel written in a "young voice", the TV story has been fleshed out to incorporate the adults. And there is as a result a lot of adultery - actual and contemplated. Despite it being set in a milieu and culture vastly different from my own, there are some universal elements to it. That one close friend, boys, acts of truancy. And many years later, a memory of the adult life of your parents with all its attendant responsibilities and miseries.
And remarkably the look of the serial evokes nostalgia - was the whole world in fact awash with a similar aesthetic sensibility?! My grandmother's plastic roses similar to the one above occupied pride of place in her house and I have seen so many of those landscapes (pic source here). All I can say is perhaps some things should pass.
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I just finished reading It Rained all Night - as it happens written in the late 1960s - a novella I enjoyed so much I am planning to order another book by the author, Buddhadeva Bose. I have seldom read a better account of adultery - and really that is all there is to the novella, a wife has an affair and over a night husband and wife relay their internal thoughts. It did make me wonder though why so many Bengali novels have themes of female adultery :-)
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Awhile back, I got around to seeing The Deep Blue Sea. I love Terence Davies' films so I was looking forward to watching it and it didn't disappoint at all. Like all Davies films it's not for everyone. It is slow and static at points, and there is none of the "lushness" endemic to period cinema. The movie is set in postwar England and its curious in that it does not feel like a meticulous reconstruction of the past, it is the past. I haven't read the play but the movie itself is a detailed look at adultery, the title indicating that there are no choices in the situation. It has some fine actors but the overall strength of the film is the way it is made. Long after it is over you are still immersed in the difficult, draining experience that adultery can be. Some of its more powerful images though are songs that evoke the communal experience of war and its aftermath. Given that it is a post war film, all around lie the ruins of the war so perhaps there is a subtext to the film of the country itself sloughing off a staid past and the excitement of a turbulent time to emerge into something uncertain. Certainly its ending shot suggests that.
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The Blue Kite is among my favourite films so when Springtime in a Small Town came out I went along to see it. The tale of a wife in a loveless marriage with an ailing husband whose former lover returns to the eponymous town, it was disappointing on that first viewing. I recently re-watched it and had a completely different reaction. Like with Terence Davies's films, there is little to immediately engage you, it eschews beautiful costumes, locales, drama - the basic ingredients of period films. Instead on a second viewing it engages you like a novel. Though the actors aren't always up to mark, you can "read" the film, without the immediate visual stimulation or conventional pacing you are more attentive to what lies beneath. Once you do this it turns out to be a rewarding film. Like The Deep Blue Sea, Springtime too is Forbidden Love Among the Ruins-in the case of Springtime the setting is after the end of Japanese occupation. Except that nothing uncertain yet hopeful emerges from this triangle, everything is statis.
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Statis. A word and frame of mind I am grappling with at the moment.
