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In this space last year, I wrote about the effect of watching a film (Ravi Jadhav’s Nude) set in Bombay’s JJ School of Art, where my mother had learnt drawing in the 1960s. This current column is, without having been planned that way, a parental companion piece. As I write it, I’m about to go to Doon School, Dehradun to hold a workshop about film appreciation. I have never been there before, but my father – who died exactly two years ago this week – studied there.
My relationship with him was very troubled, to put it mildly; things had gone wrong for him in his teenage years, as he fell into what would become a lifetime of substance abuse and consequent mental illness and delusion, eventually alienating everyone around him. After his death, it was both soothing and depressing to hear complimentary things about what a fine student and “all-rounder” he had been in his school days, how intelligent and sensitive.
Without getting into too many details, I have always felt a strong personality connect with my father, and grateful – lucky – that I have (so far) led a more stable life. I am easily drawn to creative works about a child trying to resist the influence of a problematic parent: from Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader to stories set in our own galaxy. And I’m thinking of two narratives – one a celebrated 1970s film, the other an episode from an acclaimed web series – that crosscut between the lives of a father and son, creating both parallels and contrasts. One of them even centres on a boarding school.
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A film clip I am showing at the Doon workshop is the long scene that occurs midway through The Godfather Part II, where the young Vito Corleone (played by Robert De Niro) becomes a killer for the first time. In its use of space, colour, movement and contrasts, the sequence is a striking one: the formidable Don Fanucci saunters through the crowded streets of Little Italy (a religious procession is on), Vito tracks him from the rooftops, lithely moving from one building to the next. He intercepts and shoots Fanucci in a darkened stairway; deed done, he returns home, where his wife is sitting with their children. Vito takes his infant son Michael’s little hand into his own, caresses it, and says in Italian, “Your father loves you very much.”This last bit might be deemed a case of a great film becoming a little too obvious in its symbolism. Here is a father, his hands freshly tainted by murder, almost literally “passing on” the sin to his baby boy (who, the informed viewer knows, will grow up to be his eventual, unlikely successor). But then The Godfather Part II is also an example of what Manny Farber described as Elephant Art: this is a behemoth, loudly trumpeting its themes as it cuts between young Vito, making his way up the ladder of organized crime, and Michael, consumed by his father’s legacy decades later.
Elephants can be graceful and languid too, though, and this film moves seamlessly between minor and major keys. On one hand, there is the restraint we expect of Francis Ford Coppola and his cast of Method actors, the attention to detail, the little gestures; on the other hand, there are sweeping, operatic moments, grand statements about family, about man passing misery on to man, about religion and original sin. And there are cinematic echoes. When Vito retrieves the gun that he has hidden inside a chimney on that rooftop, it recalls the scene in the first Godfather film where Michael, ready for HIS first killing, dislodges a concealed gun from behind the flush-tank in a washroom. I always find it fascinating to discuss the Fanucci-murder scene with students: even when they don’t know the Godfather films, they respond to little things such as the black humour, the ironic use of the Jesus statue during the procession, the lighting during the murder.
I was reminded of The Godfather Part II last year when I caught one of the best episodes of the Netflix series The Crown. “Paterfamilias” is a similarly operatic yet tightly constructed mini-film which dramatizes the boarding-school childhoods, 25 years apart, of Prince Philip and his son Charles. Philip attends Gordonstoun, Scotland in the 1930s, finds a family there, survives a difficult personal crisis, and is toughened; the more sheltered and reserved Charles finds it much harder to adapt to the boarding-school ethos when he is forced to go there.
I’m far from enamored by the British royals, but that was irrelevant when I watched this episode. It’s beautifully structured, performed and scored (by Rupert Gregson Williams), and combines grandeur with intimacy in a way that recalls the Coppola film. It also achieves that rare feat, creating empathy for two very different personality types who are in conflict. A scene near the end where Philip explodes in anger at his “weak” son may seem like a textbook case of an alpha-male bullying an introvert, but given the path the episode has taken in getting here, it is possible to feel deeply for both characters. And to recall again the Larkin line about man inevitably passing misery on to man. (As one character says, “You too will fail, as all parents do, and be hated in turn.”)I’m tempted to show this whole, 50-minute episode at my workshop too, but I’m not sure that would be a nice thing to do to boarding-school students. Some of whom may have their own daddy issues.
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[Related posts: an art school and my mother; earlier Hindu columns]
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