Teaser Tuesday - Feb 7

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

The students wore white t-shirts with the words Juifs Contre la Guerre across their chests. They we talking, laughing, leaning on their signs.

from Alexander Maksik's You Deserve Nothing. This is our book group book of the month - and I've just finished it! It was a book I gradually went off as it progressed, the Guardian review highlights some of the shortcomings, sub-Camus - I'd forgotten that the woman in 'Etranger' is also called Marie, by the time we had the tale of the dark days of the French police under Papon and the Algerian Massacre I was feeling emotionally manipulated and then after a bit of digging I found this tale relating to the background of the book (don't follow that link if you want to read the book with an open mind!). If you have followed it - then my summary can't be separated from those events.

An Education

The final film of Silk Screen's 2010-2011 season was Nick Hornby's adaption of Lynn Barber's book 'An Education', here's the trailer:

some wonderful scenes and details, funny and yet there's the emotional punch hiding in the background of a 16 year old being seduced (in many ways) by an older man. Carey Mulligan is wonderful as the youngster, but Molina is excellent as the father also seduced by Peter Sarsgaard's winning ways. I intend to read the book and here's the Guardian review and here's another which is worth the read:

An Education plays out rather like a diary read. When you write of exciting moments in your life, you don’t need to elaborate on certain things, like best friends’ names or schoolwork, and this film doesn’t bother to either.

The showing was followed by the society's AGM - the most highly rated - by the audiences - film of the season was In the Valley of Elah, which, alas, we didn't see with the events of last year. Before it I was educated in the ways of projecting the films - so future reviews here maybe less impartial!
Back on 'An Education' both of us bridled at the letter from Oxford University - obviously the college system was thought to be too complicated for viewers - I also spotted a cup design in one of the scenes of which I still have a piece (I bought mine in the 70's).

Entre les Murs

A trip last night to the Cornerhouse to see Bégaudeau amd Cantet's 'Entre les Murs' a film about teaching in an inner city Parisian school. Cinema 3 was packed out at 5:45 with hardly a free seat - and they're been showing it for two weeks! A slow paced absorbing film immersing you in very real dilemmas.
As Peter Bradshaw's Guardian review says:

This story builds quietly, almost invisibly, through the film, and culminates in the disciplinary hearing in which Souleymane's non-French-speaking mother is present and in which the gloweringly silent and defiant pupil must translate her passionate and heartbreaking defence of him as a good boy. Like the rest of the film, this scene is natural and unforced and effortlessly persuasive, but it is the non-dramatic sequences that I somehow found the most gripping. François has a lesson in which he simply demonstrates at some length the imperfect subjunctive tense.

Strongly recommended! Don't think it could have been filmed without the previous example of Etre et Avoir which takes a junior school, this one is very much teenagers and, for me, throughout, the shadow of yesterday's events in a German school darkened the picture.
Apparently the Bégaudeau novel is even slower paced, making it not to difficult for non-native French speakers to get to grips with.
A dinner in (too much) haste on the way back to the station at Don Giovanni's - risotto - delicious as ever!