Nicholas Hytner
Alan Bennett Stephen Beresford
Ralph Fiennes Taylor Uttley Oliver Briscombe Amara Okereke
Hi all,
Since we started the monthly screenings in 2006 we always wanted just to show great films, in a community setting and take enough money to pay for the hall hire, film licence and rental of the audio-visual equipment. We never have (and never will) take any payment for ourselves.
Over the years, the number of attendees has varied from very few (Kill List in 2010 attracted just 17) to Persopolis (in 2009 which packed us out with over 80 attendees). Over time attendances balanced out and we could continue to provide great films in the heart of our community.
However, since we restarted after Covid, we have not been attracting the same numbers and we are having to consider winding up our operations…so we are asking for your help.
Our next film is The Choral – it’s a belter (see review below) so if you could come along (and bring a friend or two) it would be greatly appreciated.
In the meantime, if you have ideas we’d appreciate your feedback/thoughts via the link below:
https://us14.list-manage.com/survey?u=23f5c17bf48f7dd33e54f5ccb&id=f0ad663295&attribution=false
or send an email to largedoor1@hotmail.co.uk
Thanks from the CFI collective.
Meanwhile - our next film is
THE CHORAL
Ralph Fiennes leads the choir in impressively unsentimental Alan Bennett fable
Alan Bennett’s new film, directed by Nicholas Hytner, is a quiet and consistent pleasure: an unsentimental but deeply felt drama which subcontracts actual passion to the music of Elgar and leaves us with a heartbeat of wit, poignancy and common sense. Music itself mysteriously exalts and redeems the community, and I mean it as the highest possible praise when I say that The Choral reminds me of Victoria Wood’s musical That Day We Sang, about the recording of Purcell’s Nymphs and Shepherds by Manchester Children’s Choir.
The film is about men in a fictional Yorkshire town during the first world war who are variously too old or too young to fight, and the women who have to deal with the menfolk’s repressed emotions and their own. The place is upended by the arrival of Dr Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes) who is to be the choirmaster, directing the music society’s annual production; he scandalises some with the fact that he once lived in Germany and has a scholar’s love of that country’s literature and music – as well as the fact that he is a bachelor who had a close friendship with another young man now serving overseas.
German composers such as Bach, Beethoven and Handel being unacceptable, Dr Guthrie proposes to his ragtag crew of amateurs a radical new production of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, its theme of death being the more heart-wrenching in the circumstances. He gets permission from Elgar himself for this performance, though not his daringly interpretive new variations.
The humour is delivered with the same conviction and discreetly weighted force as the sadness, and the same goes for this film’s determinedly unbowdlerised view of sex; just when you thought this was a picturesque movie, Bennett gives us the question of a young disabled soldier having to learn to masturbate with the other hand now that he only has one arm, and having to persuade his now ex-sweetheart to do it for him. Perhaps this is Bennett’s late style: a wintry, comic acknowledgment of mortality.
Peter Bradshaw, Guardian
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