giovedì 16 aprile 2020

The L shaped room – Bryan Forbes

il film è girato praticamente tutto in interni, in povere e squallide camere affittate a giovani poveri, ma non solo. 
i tre protagonisti sono Jane, Toby e George, che diventano amici, ma non solo.
è il cinema inglese degli anni '60, un realismo crudo e senza scorciatoie, e senza gli happy end di Hollywood.
un piccolo e imperfetto gioiellino da non perdere.
buona visione - Ismaele







QUI il film completo, in inglese


The L-Shaped Room was Lynne Reid Banks' first novel published originally in 1960 and then by Penguin in 1962, when Bryan Forbes wrote and directed the famous film version. 
The novel tells the story, in the first person, of Jane Graham, a 27-year-old unmarried pregnant woman, thrown out of the house by her father due to the aforementioned pregnancy, who has to find lodgings and ends up in the l-shaped room.  The book opens with this scene:

There wasn't much to be said for the place, really, but it had a roof over it and a door which locked from the inside, which was all I cared about just then.  I didn't even bother to take in the details - they were pretty sordid, but I didn't notice them so they didn't depress me; perhaps because I was already at rock-bottom.  I just threw my one suitcase onto the bed, took my few belongings out of it and shut them all into one drawer of the three-legged chest of drawers.  Then there didn't seem to be anything else I ought to do so I sat in the arm-chair and stared out of the window.

The first two chapters however are almost all 'flashbacks', explaining how she came to be in this situation, and one of the themes of the book is her relationship with her father, and her life before she came to the L-shaped room and the contrast with her current situation...

… With a story that feels incredibly modern by most of its duration, The L-Shaped Room is also an amazing window over Swinging Sixties London, showing the grim and the parties with the same impeccable cinematography (courtesy of Douglas Slocombe, the man who lensed the original Indiana Jones trilogy). But the highest point of Forbes’s film is, without a doubt, the performance of Leslie Caron as Jane Fosset. Caron, mostly known by her roles in Gigi (1958) and An American in Paris (1951), gives here a complex, layered delivery as an independent woman, confident in her own feelings and ambitions, who refuses to be pushed around by society expectations or fake moralities. She is casual about her predicament, does not seek the “easy” way out, and doesn’t give herself blindly to Toby, who presents himself as a knight in shiny armour, though it would be easy to fool him. Her innocent face and decided ways make Jane Fosset an unforgettable character, and one that is most surprising as being denser and better built than most female characters nowadays (maybe because the script was based on a novel written by a woman, Lynne Reid Banks, but still, kudos for Forbes and Caron to deliver it as they did).
A bit lost to the times, The L-Shaped Room is a portrait of an incredible transition era, with a strong, memorable female protagonist, and an ending that makes no concessions to Hollywood happy-ever-after. A pleasant discovery and a must-watch for film lovers.

The L-Shaped Room (1962) has a strange position within the British 'new wave'. It feels like half a new wave film - a mid-point between the innovation of the Woodfall Films and the mainstream of the British film industry.
The frankness about sex and the sympathetic treatment of outsiders - whether they be unmarried mothers, lesbian or black - and the largely natural and non-judgmental handling of their problems seem part of the movement, but the narrative style and direction are more conventional. Director Bryan Forbes was, and still is, very much part of the British film industry establishment. As an actor he was a mainstay of war films and thrillers in the 1950s. As a director with Whistle Down the Wind (1961) and then this film, he set down a more romantic, wistful type of realism than that of Tony Richardson or Lindsay Anderson…

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