There are other ads on televisions and movie screens throughout Victoria, with the same swelling theme and messianic promise. You can see them at youtube or in their original letterbox format at their website: when the pictures start orbiting the earth click the one with the clouds on it.
I saw this ad (more like was engulfed in it) on a huge screen at my local cinema, the NOVA, where I saw "The History Boys" last night (opening night in Australia). The National Theatre production of the play by Alan Bennett was a sensation when it came to New York last year (two years ago?) and immediately sold out. I've been waiting eagerly for the film version (with the NT cast) ever since.
It's very enjoyable. The script is terrific, the acting (except for the overacting headmaster) great. It raises familiar questions about the purpose of education, and very interesting and new questions about history - and poetry too. It's also very much more a gay story than I gathered from the reviews - by which I mean not so much that some of the characters
are gay (and a strangely anachronistic treatment of troubling teacher- student issues) as the sorts of issues raised, about memory and loneliness and the cycling of generations.I also wasn't prepared for the fact that it takes place in 1983, which makes the characters preparing for the Oxford entrance exams my exact contemporaries - matriculated 1984. I sat that entrance exam! And now I know why I got in. The History Boys students are coached to take unconventional points of view in their essays - and mine were nothing if not unconventional, though not because I was coached: I was annoyed that I had to sit the exam while the rest of my classmates got to sleep in! I figured I stood the chance of a snowflake in hell of getting in so I thought I might as least have fun. And so I cantankerously argued that small wasn't beautiful, that opinion polls destroy democracy, that France caused WW1 and - the coup de grâce, I thought - that Britain was responsible for the American Civil War!
(Funny that I can still remember four of those topics! I can remember only three of the scores of essays I wrote in the three ensuing years at Oxford: one asserting that there must be something wrong with logic if the ontological argument doesn't work, one praising Willi Brandt's Ostpolitik, and one rejecting Rawls' "original position" argument for not considering the possibility of reincarnation.)
If you have a chance, go see "The History Boys." But you won't find a place for the film's somewhat melancholy wisdom about education in the futuristic and apparently American-inspired Melbourne Model. The MM promises to "reveal the past" - but is it not the past that reveals us?
