The Film Club
By David Gilmour
Twelve

When I go home, my father and I watch movies. We aren’t critics by profession—only by habit—and so we pick aspiring titles and give it a go. Most of the time we are disappointed, though sometimes we are wowed, but we always debate plot devices and choices, acting, lighting and scenery, and most of all, speeches. When I was younger, we had to stop the movies so my father could explain what was happening or so we could figure them out together. After, we talked about the characters’ moral choices, the depression of American suburban life, and the lure of the exotic.

I would like to think David Gilmour had similar conversations with his son about the films they watched, though he doesn’t give us these discussions in his memoir, The Film Club. We do not get the conversations. What we do get, maybe unsurprisingly given the genre, is the story of two men dealing with the unpredictable consequences of love and the loss that accompanies them.

Gilmour is a Canadian film critic and author with some writing success, a failed marriage (but ostensibly amicable divorce), and a 15-year-old son, Jesse, who lacks direction. Jesse has already given up on school, and so Gilmour grants his wish to quit, not on the condition that he get a job or move out of the house, but that he watch three movies a week of Gilmour’s choosing.

Though they watched many more in the three year period, there are about 120 films in the book, some mentioned only by title, many with a paragraph or two of basic discussion, and a special few that receive a page or two of stage time. At times you get the sense that Gilmour is simply filling you in, filing reports so you know they watched as many movies as he claims. But on the whole he makes a concerted effort to show you that he meant this film club as alternative education. When they watch 400 Blows, a story in which a boy abandons reform school only to face the abyss of aimless freedom, the parallel to his son’s life is supposed to be instructive.

Except the point gets lost, or at least obscured, when Jesse starts dating. Occasionally Gilmour will speak of his son’s girl troubles as interruptions to the film club, and yet gradually he (and his reader) understands that the movies are interruptions to reality. This remains a struggle for Gilmour throughout the three year experiment as he migrates from picking films to jolt Jesse into thinking seriously about his life to those that will provide artistic intervention —to shock his lovelorn son out of persistent malaise.

Gilmour often revisits his decision to let Jesse quit school. Has the film club taught him anything? While Gilmour notes that knowing who directed The Shining will not help Jesse pay for his rent in the future, he takes pride in teaching Jesse the art behind filmmaking and cultivating in him the discernment to see it. And yet it seems Gilmour primarily shows Jesse films because of his implied belief in the magic of movies, and the power of art in general, to remove one from himself, if only briefly. He wants Jesse to inhale Bogart and Grant, to snort Woody Allen, The Godfather, and Stanley Kubrick, instead of binging on alcohol and cocaine—Jesse’s ready response to heartache.

But something happens instead, something the author Gilmour understands long before the narrator Gilmour. It hits him about halfway through the film club that some films just can’t do it. The sensation Gilmour felt when he first saw Around the World in 80 Days did not return, and he allows for the fact that “Some films let you down; you must have been in love or heartbroken, you must have been wound up about something when you saw them, because now, viewed from a different trajectory, there’s no magic left.”

Despite this disappointment, Gilmour is rather relieved to find an accidental purpose of the film club—a chance to befriend his son. Forcing a teenager to talk about his life is impossible, but once the mood, the lighting, and the scenery is set, he will gush about girls and ambitions and things not easily swallowed. Gilmour admits he was lucky to stumble into those three years “at a time when normally [a young man] would begin to shut the door on his parents.”

And so they talk of women while Jesse welters over losing them for a good portion of the book. As Gilmour portrays it, Jesse experiences his greatest pain when one of his exes moves on to another guy. It’s not so much that Jesse, or Gilmour when he recounts similar heartache, misses the love of his life, as much as he, no longer possessing her, considers himself no longer loved. Jesse’s sting is like that felt by Gilmour when the feeling he expected from Around the World in 80 Days, a feeling he possessed because at the moment he first saw it he sensed a peculiar unity with it, has dissipated: “I return to old movies not just to watch them again but in the hope that I’ll feel the way I did when I first saw them. (Not just about movies, but about everything).” Both men become aware of the loss of themselves brought about by the loss of what they love.

Gradually the film club peters out. Jesse has moved on. He has a budding music career, and he wants to go to college. Gilmour walks by Jesse’s empty room, Chunking Express beside the bed, and thinks how Jesse doesn’t need it anymore. This scene is the coda to Gilmour’s primary theme—the loss of things. The loss of Jesse’s education, his innocence, his loves and the loss of Gilmour’s marriage, his job (which makes the film club possible), and his son, are set against his efforts to recover them. Gilmour would love to keeps things as they are, even while teaching Jesse to let them go. This moment in his son’s old bedroom is different though; for once Gilmour musters some gratitude. He regrets nothing.

The reader might regret some aspects of the memoir. Most of the women are two-dimensional shapes, probably because they seldom speak. Rebecca Ng (“Ning”) is a constant thorn in Jesse’s love life, torturing him by coming and going when she pleases. Gilmour tells Jesse she is “a troublemaking little bitch who loves to torment you.” Which may partially be the case, but it seems too simple a dismissal for an important character. The flattening of women flattens Jesse as well. He is always the angel his father wants to see. His sincerity and genuine goodness make the reader pause to wonder why bad things happen to good people, or more likely to question the legitimacy of Gilmour’s narrative. Gilmour is no misogynist, but he tends to pit Jesse’s ex-girlfriends against himself and his son when he is disappointed with the way things turn out.

And then there is the overarching media problem of which even Gilmour appears unaware. Isn’t something askew in a world where we need media to be able to talk to our kids, to mediate our relationships? A 15-year-old son who smokes cigarettes every other page doesn’t arrive unannounced. At some point Jesse was estranged from his family and his father was not so much of a father. But perhaps when a relationship is beyond repair, and when neither side is making efforts to reconnect, then a third-party intervention—a round fired from Clint Eastwood’s gun, or the sultry voice of Audrey Hepburn—might be a helpful last resort.

While I was reading The Film Club, I began to watch some of the films Gilmour recommended. And I imagined that I was the boy watching movies with my father again. After watching a few of Gilmour’s strong recommendations, the magic, as Gilmour prophesied, went away. Or maybe the magic was not in the film to begin with, but in the relationship. If so, it cannot be recovered because as Gilmour says, “We will have time again, Jesse and I, but not that kind of time, not that rather bland, sometimes dull time which is the real signature of living with someone, time you think will go on forever, and then one day, simply doesn’t.”

David Warren is an editor at a non-profit organization in Naperville, IL.