Film Shapes

I took a post-work trip to the Palace cinema in Perth's Raine Square for this anxiety-inducing drama at the Alliance Française French Film Festival . There have been a few of these 'snowball' films of late, where one innocuous moment gets misunderstood and events spiral from it.  In this case, a good-looking, young literature teacher, Julien (François Civil) is accused of trying to seduce a student in his class. It's clear she has misconstrued innocent looks and utterances, but the letter she writes to the deputy principal needs to be looked into. A chain of missteps begins. This is based on events from the life of the director (and co-writer with Audrey Diwan), Teddy Lussi-Modeste. It seems something similar happened to him when he was teaching in a northern Paris school, and here he scratches open a few old wounds. Assuming the lead character's (and by association, the director's) innocence, the knock-on effects are dispiriting, to say the least, and fucking f...

This was the film chosen to preview the Spanish Film Festival for 2024 and it's quite the heart-wrencher. Based on a true story, from a book by Francesc Escribano, it tells of Antonio Benaiges (Enric Auquer), an idealistic teacher from Catalonia, who takes up a position in the small town of Bañuelos de Bureba in 1935. This town is probably like many others of the time - conservative, religious and fearful of outsiders. It's also full of kids who haven't seen the sea, which brings us to the title. Discovering that his charges have no idea about the sea, Antonio promises to take them on a trip to the Catalan coast, and much of the film is about his attempts to get permission from their inflexible parents. The depressing backdrop to all this is the impending Spanish Civil War between the Republicans and the Nationalists. Antonio ruffles a whole pelican's worth of feathers, from the politically pragmatic mayor, Alcalde (Antonio Mora), to the Snape-ish priest, the suitably ...