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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