Once More With Conviction

I recently saw the film 'Un Triomphe' at my local community cinema, which is what else? A former church hall where both the church and the hall were originally the highest profile places along the main street, where in different pasts 'community' was central to the use of both buildings, where the uses the buildings were put to were the glue of small town life.

The film was in French with English subtitles and the plot was easy to summarise. In a French open prison there is a drama group set up among the prisoners who are due for imminent release and they have a change of teacher. The new teacher teaches drama because he can't get the theatre work that he wants to do he seems to have hit the mid-life crisis stage in his life when nothing seems to work as it was meant to.

Six prisoners select themselves to work with the new teacher who to help himself work with his mid life crisis chooses the text that is most atypical for them to follow. 'Waiting for Godot' by Samuel Beckett, the famous text in which as one London critic when it was first performed in England said 'Nothing happens, twice'. The drama teacher saw the text as a shoe-in for life in prison, where small events assume a significance that in the wider, more free, world they would never assume the same significance.

I thought before seeing the film that part of the drama was going to be the slippery-ness of the text vs the reductive and coarse humour of  the prisoners. There was some of that but that was a kind of starter for the main course, where to learn the text the prisoners have to deal with their own temptations and difficult nature that the prison has left them to sort out, unaided until this class, as part of their confinement. Anger and illiteracy are just two of the problems that the prisoners have to draw from to find the depths in the characters of the text as it is written.

By far the biggest strength of the film was the location filming, which added a depth of feeling to, well, what life might be like in an open prison, what the differences are between life in an open prison and the experience that most of the audience would have had, of never having been imprisoned. To an extent the play 'Waiting for Godot' was what Alfred Hitchcock would have called 'a MacGuffin'-a dramatic device for moving the plot of a film or entertainment along to get the plot nearer what it is meant to be about. Here what the film is meant to be about is the prisoners relationships with life outside the prison. This MacGuffin of performing a play works wonderfully in that regard. 

 There are clashes with the prison authorities, trustees, and other figures for whom part of their self interest is withholding from prisoners what they have themselves-freedom to think and plan, freedom of action within a privileged society. There the film could have dwelt more on the contradictions of the prison system than it did.

The acting in the film is terrific, and another strong reason to see the film at the cinema rather than at home on a DVD where merely having the remote means wanting to use it which breaks the atmosphere that the film creates. It is also a film that you could watch repeatedly for different angles of the drama, the drama as seen by different characters.

How does it end? The end of the film improves on how the play ends and it is a all a quite surprising win-win situation, but I will leave the viewer of the film to find that out for themselves. There is also a post-script to the film that adds to how the film ends which viewers wil also have to find for themselves.

            That is all folks.....