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SHINE IS THE COMPELLING AND POIGNANT STORY OF A YOUNG MAN WHO DEFIES HIS FATHER'S WISHES IN ORDER OT PURSUE HIS DREAMS. BOTH THOUGHT-PROVOKING AND POWERFUL, IT TELLS A STORY OF REBELLION AND OF INDIVIDUALITY THROUGH THE EYES OF A PIANIST WHOSE ONLY FORM OF SELF EXPRESSION IS FOUND IN THE KEYS OF HIS INSTRUMENT.
Description
This tearjerker by Australian filmmaker Scott Hicks is a surprising story about real-life classical pianist David Helfgott, an Australian who rose to international prominence at a very young age in the 1950s and '60s, and suffered a psychological collapse after enduring years of abuse from his father (Armin Mueller-Stahl). Hicks has three very fine actors portraying Helfgott at different stages of his life, including the adorably wry and goofy Noah Taylor (Flirting), who takes up the character's teen years, and Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush, giving a great performance playing the musician as a schizophrenic adult. Despite the Helfgotts' compromised psychological health, Shine is hardly a depressing experience. If anything, the story is really about how long one person's life can take to make glorious sense of itself. Sir John Gielgud, in golden form, plays Helfgott's teacher. The DVD release presents the film in its widescreen format, and also includes a Q&A with director Hicks and Rush's Golden Globes acceptance speech. --Tom Keogh
Shine Customer Review
That's a marvelous but cruel film. Cruel to us in its beauty. Cruel to David in his complete estrangement from the world of noise lost that he is in his world of music. How can you be deaf to anything but music? It is possible, even if that sounds crazy, if that is a mental lunacy. The film tries to get us to two conclusions. The first one is that a father can be right but only for a short while. A son has to get away from his father as soon as he can otherwise he might be destroyed, utterly destroyed. In this case he is only mentally destroyed. He loses the sense of time and even space probably. Time does not exist any more, which is not serious in itself; many people can live without time. But duration, goes away too and that is unbearable. When life does not have any duration any more it does not exist any longer and it becomes so static that it may drown you completely. David Helfgott is saved from his predicament, first by one decision: to go away from his father when he gets a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London. Then by the phenomenal teacher he gets in London that accepts his decision to play Rachmaninoff in the Albert Hall, what his father wanted him to play when he was still a child. The connection of the father and his curse, the composer and his own predicament, and his emotion that he projects into the music, the place and his father's absence, all that does it: he loses the sound of the world, though not of the music, he loses the sense of duration and he falls into a complete vacuum, a mental hospital. He will be taken out of it by a simple lady who plays the piano for the patients, and then from this to that he will find a bar where he will be able to perform day after day and build a reputation that will attract people and one woman will accept to redeem him to life and marry him into a new career in the Albert Hall again for a second triumph, this time with no escape possible from the stage and success. And that is the second lesson. When you run away from your father and you lose him in the process, you lose any and all sense of reality that can only come back to you from inside and by accepting to bring that inside world of yours out. But you need some helping hands along the way, helping hands you have to negotiate and find all by yourself. And David did it. The son of the super poor surviving Jew exiled in Australia after the war was able to reach the sky and be some kind of an angel up there in the sunrise dancing in mid air as if he were on a trampoline. This optimism is refreshing because we all know too many people who did not end up like that. For one of these victims of life that manages to get through, so many will never even be able to raise their eyes and look at the stars.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
★★★ Read More Reviews ★★★
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