August Rush (2007)/In the House (2012)

Memory is a funny thing...and two films viewed this week demonstrate this.

I first saw "August Rush" shortly after its release and thought, "OK, that was an interesting movie...maybe a little soppy, but OK". Reviews ranged from 'iffy' to adequate and I put it out of my mind. Or I thought I had. Yet snippets of the movie kept coming back to me and a gradual fondness began to emerge, so I decided upon a second viewing -- and I'm pleased that I did. It's a strange and as it turned out in my case a haunting film with much to recommend it.

In short, classical cellist (Keri Russell) and Irish rock musician (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) meet, have a one night stand, and go their very separate ways. When she finds that she is pregnant, she so wants the child as a reminder of that one carefree night in her ordered life, but her father-cum-manager convinces her that her son was still-born and that her career is all that matters. However she has lost the taste for his stern discipline and retires. Meyers too wants desperately to find what he now believes to be his destined and lost love, leaving his group to try to get on with some semblance of life. Meanwhile their child has been placed in a state orphanage, and youngster Freddie Highmore (in a remarkable performance) refuses all offers of adoption, believing in his heart of hearts that his real parents will find him.

Befriended by caring welfare worker Terence Howard, he runs away to New York hoping he will help him locate his family, but arrangements go astray and he ends up in the not-so-tender hands of Robin Williams, playing a latter-day Fagin, who is providing a home of sorts for a bunch of lost boys-cum-street musicians. The young lad has always heard music in the wind and the trees and he soon demonstrates a prodigious musical talent. Through a set of plot contrivances necessary to move the story forward, he ends up living at the Julliard School of Music where this teenaged prodigy composes an incredible urban symphony that is to be premiered (with his conducting) in Central Park. However Fagin Williams does not want to let the boy-wonder (and meal-ticket) escape his clutches. It is a frantic race for him to reach the park for the concert, where Russell has come out of retirement to play and where Meyers too is drawn. The inevitable family reunion is downplayed, yet the viewer knows as the music surges that they will now live happily ever after. 

With its amazing mix of music -- classic, rock, folk, symphonic -- and a likeable cast (except maybe Williams) I'm not surprised that the film stayed with me over the intervening years -- unlike some movies which I viewed last month and can now barely remember. I've always had a soft spot for the underused Russell (who started her career in the Mickey Mouse Club in 1991) though I've rather more ambiguous feelings about Meyers, even if his defining role in the TV series "Gormengast" (2000) is another memory-worm. And as mentioned above, young Highmore gives his all. He's had a wonderful career as a child actor from age seven and seems to be continuing along the same lines as a young man, even if he is now playing Norman Bates in "Bates Motel"! Yes, as it turns out, "August Rush" is a movie well worth remembering.

At another extreme, I scheduled BBC4's premiere showing of the French movie "In the House", even if the storyline seemed to ring vague bells. I checked all my many lists and decided that I couldn't possibly have viewed the film previously, but from the minute we started watching, it all seemed very, very familiar. We couldn't work out where or when we had seen it nor quite remember how it panned out, so we kept on watching. I eventually realised that I own a DVD of the movie. How stupid can you be Pat? Or how forgetful?

It all came back to me -- although completely forgotten over the last few years -- and it was no punishment viewing it a second time. Adopted from a play by director Francois Ozon, whose films delight in playing games, it follows Fabrice Luchini's high school literature teacher (with the lovely name of Germain Germain) as he and his childless wife (Kirstin Scott Thomas) become increasingly bewitched by the essays turned in by one his pupils. Said student, Claude, played by Ernst Umhauer, has ingratiated himself into the family life of one of his classmates on the grounds that he is helping the dim lad with his maths. But he is besotted with 'the middle-class mother, played by Emanuelle Seigner and plots to whisk her away from the Raphas, Senior and Junior. Each instalment ends with the words 'to be continued' and Luchini and Scott Thomas hang on every syllable as the saga unfolds. However one never knows whether the youngster's stories are fact or fiction and to what extent he is trying to infiltrate into his teacher's own life. Luchini's mentoring of the young writer eventually backfires when he loses both his job and his wife, but the insidious little monster is already tempting him with the tales of what he imagines to be going on in many other flats and houses. 

If nothing else I should have remembered Scott Thomas' frantic attempts to make a go of her pretentious and wildly pornographic art gallery and the delightful cameo from one of my favourite French actresses, Yolande Moreau, playing twins. Such are the vagaries of memory.