The Film Club (2 page)

“Dad, the notes are at my—”

“Never mind about the notes. I want you to think about whether or not you want to keep going to school.”

“Why?”

I could feel my heart speeding up, the blood moving into my face. This was a place I'd never been to before, never even imagined before. “Because if you don't, it's all right.”

“What's all right?”

Just say it, spit it out.

“If you don't want to go to school anymore, then you don't have to.”

He cleared his throat. “You're going to let me quit school?”

“If you want. But please, take a few days to think about it. It's a monu—”

He got to his feet. He always got to his feet when he was excited; his long limbs couldn't endure the agitation of keeping still. Leaning his frame over the table, he lowered his voice as if afraid of being overheard. “I don't need a few days.”

“Take them anyway. I insist.”

Later that same evening, I braced myself with a couple of glasses of wine and called his mother at my loft (it was in an old candy factory) to break the news. She was a lanky, lovely actress, the kindest woman I've ever known. An “unactressy” actress, if you know what I mean. But a worst-case scenarist of the first order and within only a few moments she saw him living in a cardboard box in Los Angeles.

“Do you think this has happened because he has low self-esteem?” Maggie asked.

“No,” I said, “I think it's happened because he hates school.”

“There has to be something wrong with him if he hates school.”

“
I
hated school,” I said.

“Maybe that's where he's getting it from.” We went on in this vein for a while until she was in tears and I was spouting rash, sweeping generalizations that would have done Che Guevara proud.

“He's got to get a job then,” Maggie said.

“Is there any point, do you think, in substituting one activity he loathes for another?”

“What's he going to do then?”

“I don't know.”

“Maybe he could do some volunteer work,” she sniffed.

I woke up in the middle of the night, my wife, Tina, stirring beside me, and wandered over to the window. The moon hung disproportionately low in the sky; it had lost its way and was waiting to be called home. What if I'm wrong? I thought. What if I'm being hip at the expense of my son and letting him ruin his life?

It's true, I thought. He's got to do something. But what? What can I get him to do that won't be a repetition of the whole school debacle? He doesn't read; he loathes sports. What does he like to do? He likes to watch movies. So did I. In fact, for a few years in my late thirties, I had been the rather glib film critic for a television show. What could we do with that?

Three days later he turned up for dinner at Le Paradis, a French restaurant with white tablecloths and heavy silverware. He was waiting for me outside, sitting on a stone balustrade, smoking a cigarette. He never liked to sit in a restaurant by himself. It made him self-conscious, everybody writing him off as a loser with no friends.

I gave him a hug, you could feel the strength in his young body, its vitality. “Let's order the wine and then have a chat.”

We went in. Handshakes. Adult rituals which flattered him. Even a joke between him and the bartender about John-Boy from
The Waltons
.We sat in a slightly distracted silence waiting for the waiter. We were both waiting on something crucial; there was nothing else to talk about till then. I let him order the wine.

“Corbière,” he whispered. “That's southern France, right?”

“Right.”

“A bit of barnyard?”

“That's the one.”

“The Corbière, please,” this to the waitress with a smile which said, I know I'm playing monkey-see, monkey-do here but I'm having fun anyway.
God, he has a beautiful
smile.

We waited till the wine arrived. “You do the honours,” I said. He smelled the cork, gave the wine a clumsy whirl in his glass, and rather like a cat at an unfamiliar dish of milk, took a sip. “I can't tell,” he said, his nerve abandoning him at the last moment.

“Yes, you can,” I said. “Just relax. If you think it's off, it's off.”

“I get nervous.”

“Just smell it. You'll know. First impression is always right.”

He took another smell.

“Get your nose right in there.”

“It's fine,” he said.

The waitress sniffed the top of the bottle. “Nice to see you again, Jesse. We see your dad here all the time.”

We looked around the restaurant. The elderly couple from Etobicoke was there. A dentist and his wife, their son finishing up a business degree at some university in Boston. They waved. We waved back.
What if I'm wrong?

“So,” I said, “have you been thinking about what we talked about?”

I could see he wanted to get to his feet but he couldn't. He looked around as though irritated by the constraint. Then drew his pale face close to mine as if he was divulging a secret. “The truth is,” he whispered, “I don't ever want to see the inside of a school again.”

My stomach fluttered. “Okay then.”

He looked at me, speechless. He was waiting for the
quo
in the
quid pro quo
.

I said, “One thing, though. You don't have to work, you don't have to pay rent. You can sleep till five every day. But no drugs. Any drugs and the deal's off.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I mean it. I'll drop a fucking
house
on you if you start in with that stuff.”

“Okay.”

“But,” I said, “there's something else.” (I felt like the detective in
Columbo
.)

“What?” he said.

“I want you to watch three movies a week with me. I pick them. It's the only education you're going to get.”

“You're kidding,” he said after a moment.

I didn't waste any time. The next afternoon, I sat him down on the blue couch in the living room, me on the right, him on the left, pulled the curtains and showed him François Truffaut's
The
400
Blows
(1959). I figured it was a good way to slide into European art films which I knew were going to bore him until he learned how to watch them. It's like learning a variation on regular grammar.

Truffaut, I explained (I wanted to keep it brief), came to filmmaking through the back door; he was a high-school dropout (like you), a draft dodger, a small-time thief; but he adored movies and spent his childhood sneaking into the cinema houses that were all over post-war Paris in those days.

When he was twenty years old, a sympathetic editor offered Truffaut a job writing film criticism—which led, a half-dozen years later, to making his first film.
The
400
Blows
(which means literally “sowing your wild oats”) was an autobiographical look at Truffaut's troubled early years of truancy.

To find an actor to play a teenage version of himself, the twenty-seven-year-old novice director put an ad in the newspaper. A few weeks later a dark-haired kid who'd run away from a boarding school in central France and hitchhiked to Paris turned up to audition for the role of Antoine.

His name was Jean-Pierre Léaud. (By now, I had Jesse's attention.) I mention that with the exception of one scene in a psychiatrist's office, the film was shot entirely without sound—that was added later—because Truffaut didn't have the money for recording equipment. I ask Jesse to watch for a famous scene where a whole class of kids disappears behind their teacher's back during a field trip through Paris; I touch lightly on a marvellous moment when the young boy, Antoine, is talking to a woman psychiatrist.

“Watch for the smile he gives when she asks him about sex,” I say. “Remember, there was no script; this was totally improvised.”

Just in time I caught myself starting to sound like a dandruffy high-school teacher. So I put on the movie. We went all the way to the end, that long scene where Antoine runs away from reform school; he runs through fields, past farmhouses, through apple groves until he arrives at the dazzling ocean. It's as if he's never seen it before. Such
immensity
! It seems to stretch out forever. He goes down a bank of wooden steps; he advances across the sand and there, just where the waves start in, he pulls back slightly and looks into the camera; the film freezes; the movie's over.

After a few moments, I said, “What did you think?”

“A bit boring.”

I recouped. “Do you see any parallels between Antoine's situation and yours?”

He thought about that for a second. “No.”

I said, “Why do you think he has that funny expression on his face at the end of the movie, the last shot?”

“I don't know.”

“How does he look?”

“He looks worried,” Jesse said.

“What could he be worried about?”

“I don't know.”

I said, “Look at his situation. He's run away from reform school and from his family; he's free.”

“Maybe he's worried about what he's going to do now.”

I said, “What do you mean?”

“Maybe he's saying, ‘Okay, I've made it this far. But what's next?'”

“Okay, let me ask you again,” I said. “Do you see anything in common between his situation and yours?”

He grinned. “You mean what am I going to do now that I don't have to go to school?”

“Yes.”

“I don't know.”

“Well, maybe that's why the kid looks worried. He doesn't know either,” I said.

After a moment he said, “When I was in school, I worried about getting bad marks and getting in trouble. Now that I'm not in school, I worry that maybe I've ruined my life.”

“That's good,” I said.

“How is it good?”

“It means you're not going to relax into a bad life.”

“I wish I could stop worrying though. Do you worry?”

I found myself taking an involuntary breath. “Yes.”

“So it never stops, no matter how well you do?”

“It's about the
quality
of the worry,” I said. “I have happier worries now than I used to.”

He stared out the window. “This is all making me feel like having a cigarette. Then I can worry about getting lung cancer.”

For dessert I gave him
Basic Instinct
(1992) with Sharon Stone the next day. Again, I offered up a little intro to the film, nothing fancy. Simple rule of thumb: Keep it bare bones. If he wants to know more, he'll ask.

I said, “Paul Verhoeven. Dutch director; came to Hollywood after a few hits in Europe. Great visual attack; exquisite lighting. Made a couple of excellent films, ultra-violent but watchable.
Robocop
is the best of the bunch.” (I was starting to sound like a Morse code machine but I didn't want to lose him.)

I went on, “He also made one of the worst films ever, a camp classic called
Showgirls
.”

We started in, a tawny-skinned blond butchering a man with an ice pick while engaged in sexual intercourse with him. Nice opening volley. After fifteen minutes it's difficult not to make the assumption that
Basic Instinct
is not just
about
sleazy people, it's
by
sleazy people. There's a dirty-eared, schoolboy's fascination with cocaine and lesbian “decadence.” But it's a marvellously watchable film, you have to say that. It evokes a kind of agreeable dread. Something important or nasty always seems to be happening, even when it isn't.

And then there's the dialogue. I mention to Jesse that the writer Joe Esterhas, a former journalist, was paid three million dollars for this kind of stuff:

Detective: How long were you dating him?

Sharon Stone: I wasn't dating him. I was fucking him.

Detective: Are you sorry he's dead?

Sharon Stone: Yes. I liked fucking him.

Jesse couldn't take his eyes off the screen. He may have appreciated
The
400
Blows
but this was something else.

“Can we pause it for a moment?” he said and raced to the toilet for a pee; from the couch I heard the clank of the toilet seat, then a gush, as if a horse was standing in there. “Close the door, Jesse, for Pete's sake!” (We were learning all sorts of things today.) Bang, door closed. Then he hurried back, stocking feet thumping the floor; holding his pants by the waist, he vaulted back onto the couch. “You have to admit it, Dad, this is a
great
film.”

2

One day he brought a girl home. Her name was Rebecca Ng, a Vietnamese knockout. “Nice to meet you, David,” she said, holding my eye.

David?

“How's your day going?”

“How's my day going?” I repeated idiotically. “So far, so good.”

Did I enjoy living in the neighbourhood? Why, yes, thank you.

“I have an aunt who lives a few streets over,” she said. “She's very nice. Old country but very nice.”

Old country?

Rebecca Ng (pronounced Ning) was dressed to the nines, spotless white jeans, maroon, long-collared blouse, leather jacket, Beatle boots. You had the feeling she'd paid for these clothes herself, an after-school job in a Yorkville boutique, Saturdays serving drinks to ring-removing executives in the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel (when she wasn't polishing off an early credit in calculus). As she turned her head to speak to Jesse, I caught a whiff of perfume. Delicate, expensive.

“So here we are,” she said.

Then he took her downstairs to his bedroom. I opened my mouth to protest. It was a pit down there. There were no windows, no natural light. Just a bed with a ratty green blanket, clothes on the floor, CDs splashed around the room, a computer facing the wall, a “library” consisting of an autographed Elmore Leonard (unread), George Eliot's
Middlemarch
(a hopeful gift from his mother), plus a collection of hip-hop magazines with scowling black men on the cover. A collection of water glasses squatted on the night table. They cracked like a pistol shot when you pried them loose. There was also the occasional “adult” magazine (
1
-
800
-Slut
) peeking from the space between his mattress and box spring. “I don't have a problem with pornography,” he told me matter-of-factly.