Review — The Film Club

The Film Club
by David Gilmour
Thomas Allen Publishers (2007), 264 pp.

A long-limbed teenaged boy, Jesse Gilmour,is loping toward failure in high school when his dad makes him an offer: you can drop out of school, he says, if you agree to watch three select movies every week and not use any drugs.

Of course Jesse says yes. Father and son begin that “gorgeous time” together, and we begin an atypical memoir written by David Gilmour, recipient of a Governor General’s Award for his novel A Perfect Night to Go to China. This slim book follows the film club’s three-year existence. Gilmour describes the movies he introduces to his son, the discussions that arise, the interruptions by girlfriends and drugs and self-doubt.

The analysis of film is incisive, directed at both Jesse and the readers. Pay attention to the self-possessed stillness of James Dean in Giant, Gilmour says; check out the lengthened staircase in the final scene of Hitchcock’s Notorious; get caught by the closing shot of La Dolca Vita, when the girl on the beach looks into the camera, which prompts Gilmour to reflect, “And you, the glance says to the audience, what about your life?”

And what about Jesse’s life? Well, it seems to be a mess. Cinematic characters don’t speak directly to Jesse’s predicament as he stumbles through his downtown Toronto adolescence. But his father’s method of teaching is rarely didactic. Nonetheless, Jesse is gleaning what he needs — or so his father hopes.

The film club was an indulgence for both David and Jesse Gilmour. Reading the book feels like an indulgence, too: a memoir about men and boys and what they really feel, how they really talk when alone with each other. The place smells like cigarettes and man-sweat, with cusses hanging in the air, the sourness of hangovers and lust. Toward the end of the book, when Jesse is a virile young rapper who is gaining emotional independence from his father, Gilmour writes about revisiting the old movies “in the hope that I’ll feel the way I did when I first saw them. (Not just about movies either but about everything.)” he can’t, and everyone knows it.