Mia Hansen-Løve proves that less is more in a beautifully observed tale of a student's romantic entanglements
The critic and columnist Alan Brien once told me about a friend consulting him about an autobiography he'd been asked to write. It was the mid-1950s when angry young men were all the rage, the friend was about 30 and clearly the publishers expected him to deliver something socially significant. "In 1939," he asked, referring to his sixth-form days, "whom should I have been reading and what should I have been thinking?" Somewhat mischievously Brien suggested he should have discovered Orwell, become disillusioned with Auden and Isherwood, had a sceptical approach to the Popular Front but a high regard for John Strachey, and so on. When I checked out the eventual book these were precisely the attitudes expressed, though whether these aspects of the author's intellectual development all came from Brien's tuition I can't be sure.
The critic and columnist Alan Brien once told me about a friend consulting him about an autobiography he'd been asked to write. It was the mid-1950s when angry young men were all the rage, the friend was about 30 and clearly the publishers expected him to deliver something socially significant. "In 1939," he asked, referring to his sixth-form days, "whom should I have been reading and what should I have been thinking?" Somewhat mischievously Brien suggested he should have discovered Orwell, become disillusioned with Auden and Isherwood, had a sceptical approach to the Popular Front but a high regard for John Strachey, and so on. When I checked out the eventual book these were precisely the attitudes expressed, though whether these aspects of the author's intellectual development all came from Brien's tuition I can't be sure.
- 5/5/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
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