Boy A - John Crowley

mai arrivato in sala in Italia, è un film non facile, e però girato con mano da maestro.
non si mostra niente di morboso, eppure si sta male, e molto.
e si sta con Jack, che a dieci anni è stato colpevole di qualcosa di terribile.
il punto del film è se può esistere recupero e redenzione, e chi deve sopportarne il peso.
Jack non ce la fa, contro tutti.
Andrew Garfield (Eric/Jack) è grandissimo (già visto anche in "Non lasciarmi" e "Parnassus").
"Boy A" è un piccolo imperfetto capolavoro, non fatevelo sfuggire, i venditori di popcorn non amano film così, noi sì - Ismaele

…The film, directed by John Crowley and written by Mark O'Rowe, paints an accurate portrait of working-class life in the north of England, the grimness of the streets contrasting with the beauty of the countryside. It is spoken with accents, Mullen's Scottish the hardest to understand. He can speak standard English, but the accent is one of his tools. I've never had a problem with his speech, because he is such a great actor you can forget the words and listen to the music.

He and Garfield fit well together -- both have faces you like on first sight, both have charm, both have warmth. Garfield, just now emerging as a talent to watch ("The Other Boleyn Girl" and "Lions for Lambs"), inhabits Jack effortlessly, showing his hope, his fears, his nightmares, his doubt that he deserves his new life. And the movie poses the age-old question of forgiveness. At this moment in Chicago, children with handguns kill people. Can we say, father, forgive them, for they know not what they do?

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…Le réalisateur témoigne d’une réelle maîtrise tant filmique que de mise en scène. Mais la qualité de la photographie, du jeu et du montage sont à souligner. La photographie du film est riche et plurielle, elle permet d’envisager à la fois le statut narratif des séquences et l’évolution psychologique des personnages. Le casting est simplement magique au point d’en oublier le caractère fictionnel du film. Et le montage engendre quant à lui la position active du spectateur. Même la musique est porteuse de sens : elle souligne admirablement l’atmosphère mise en place tout en renvoyant elle aussi à l’identitaire des protagonistes.

Boy A est un film d’une honnêteté rare. Il permet une réelle rencontre avec l’intimité et l’horreur, une rencontre humaine en somme.

da qui

…Boy A parle autant de rédemption que de l’impossibilité de mener une vie normale et de faire table rase du passé. John Crowley ne cherche pas ici à en mettre plein la figure et joue tout en subtilité sa partition pour ce drame qui se finira bien entendu assez mal pour ce Boy A qui va subir les foudres des gens biens, des anonymes. Tout du moins est-ce du moins le parti pris choisi par le réalisateur et le final se révèle peu à peu assez évidemment au fil du déroulement de l’histoire.

Boy A est donc à voir, si ce n’est à revoir. La quête de liberté de l’un et la soif d’aider de l’autre (Peter Mulan) s’entrechoquent ici, pour laisser place à un drame qui ne manquera pas d’interpeller certains d’entre nous. D’autant plus que les Boys don’t cry, si je peux me permettre ce petit jeu de mot.

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…Crowley’s film is a compassionate antidote to the British (and global) ruling elite’s “law-and-order” mania—a socially regressive preoccupation with containing the population and desensitizing it in the process. Its appearance also reflects a shift in popular mood against this drive.

About the Bulger case, the World Socialist Web Site wrote in June 2001: “The essential aim of the efforts to demonize Thompson and Venables [the two boys convicted of Jamie Bulger’s murder] was in order to forward an agenda for the destruction of social reforms. To justify this, it was necessary to repudiate any attempt to understand the broader social, economic and cultural processes that could give rise to aberrant behavior by children or any other social problem. Any attempt to do so was rubbished as an expression of ‘wet liberal do-gooding’ and blamed for rising lawlessness. Public discourse was brutalized in anticipation of the further brutalization of society itself.”…

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