The holidays are ending and so for youngsters and parents, it’s time for the inevitable rituals associated with going back to school and “back to reality”. For older viewers experiencing a little nostalgia for their own school days, here are three films that have school in various countries at the centres of their stories. From emotional memory poems about the struggles faced by young people in the grey post-war realities of Liverpool to the high-pressure urban hustle of 2010s New York and a magical animated ode to the wonders and innocence of first love – there’s plenty of school in all of these films, even if it’s not always the main focus of their varied but notably intriguing focuses and distinctive styles.
The arthouse essential: The Long Day Closes – YouTube
When he died in 2023, at the age of 83, veteran Liverpool-born director Terence Davies left behind a legacy of uniquely tender and ethereally crafted film essay meditations on the unreliability and sometimes cold comforts of memory drawn from his own autobiography.
This 1992 drama, like many of Davies’ films, is set in post-World War 2 Liverpool and conveys in dreamy fragments of images, sounds and music the inner world of a shy 11-year-old. Very much based on the director’s own memories of himself, he navigates the pressures of school and home life in 1950s Liverpool, where his love for cinema provides a much-needed escape from the dark edges of the real world.
Like other films by Davies that deal with similar milieus and periods, the film is meticulously crafted and makes use of carefully constructed sets that, in spite of their artificial aspects, somehow work miraculously in conjunction with all the other elements of cinema to create an emotionally honest and atmospherically true portrayal of time and place, filtered through the tricky lens of memory.
Voted by IndieWire as one of the “100 best films of the ‘90s,” it’s a film that slowly but carefully works its beautiful magic on the consciousness and senses in its taut and thoughtfully executed 84 minutes, through the working of its fragments of visual poetry into a final, deeply moving whole.
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The stone-cold classic: Margaret – Rent or buy from Apple TV +
US independent pioneer Kenneth Lonergan’s 2011 epic drama was plagued by years of battle between the director and its producers that dragged on between shooting in 2005 and its release, secured with the intervention and assistance of Martin Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker.
Though it initially received lukewarm reviews from critics and in spite of the long battle to have it see the light of day in cinemas (a very limited and mostly ignored run in US cinemas), the film has since gone on to widespread critical acclaim and is regarded by many as one of the 21st century’s finest US cinematic creations.
Anna Paquin gives the performance of her career as protagonist Lisa Cohen, a 17-year-old Manhattan high-school student who, while on her way to school one day, has a brief but fateful interaction with a bus driver. The driver’s moment of distraction with Lisa leads him to take his eyes off the road and run over a pedestrian, who dies in Lisa’s arms.
What follows is a small but big-themed existential journey for Lisa as, increasingly ridden by guilt, she becomes convinced that she is responsible for the pedestrian’s death and seeks to make amends, taking her to court and testing the limits of her ideas of who she is and the relationships she has with friends, family and society at large.
As Lisa battles to do the right thing she learns a lesson that many can take a lifetime to learn – the world is bigger, more complicated and doesn’t revolve around us.
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The diamond in the rough: Whisper of the Heart – Netflix
Produced by legendary Japanese animation creators Studio Ghibli and written by founder Hayao Miyazaki, this 1995 adaptation of Aoi Hiiragi’s 1989 Manga comic was directed by Miyazaki’s protégé, Yoshifumi Kondö who never directed another feature before his tragic death from an aneurysm in 1998.
In Tokyo, 14-year-old Shizuku Tsukishima is a junior high-school student and a book obsessed teen with dreams of becoming a writer.
While escaping to the magical world offered by the books she veraciously checks out from the library one evening, Shizuku curiously examines the lending cards and becomes intrigued to discover that all of them have previously been borrowed by the same person, whose name she doesn’t recognise.
Soon she finds herself meeting and falling for the mysterious library doppelganger, a boy named Seiji who is learning to make violins in an antique shop before pursuing his dream of training to be a master luthier in Cremona, Italy. It soon becomes clear that the young instrument maker has been watching the avid reader for a while, and his library lending habits were intended to get her attention.
A typically fascinating mix of fantasy and reality follow as the young friends embark on their separate paths before reuniting and discovering that maybe they’re meant for eternal companionship.
Hailed as a finely crafted, beautifully told and evocative story of “young adolescence and aspiration,” it’s a unique and memorable love story that became 1995’s highest grossing domestic film in Japan and was included in Time Out’s list of the “Top 50 Animated Films”.
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