Sunday, November 16, 2008

Driving Lessons



I just saw this movie and I loved it! Here is the trailer and the synopsis.

"We first meet Ben (RUPERT GRINT), a shy, bookish 17-year- old, as he begins a very unpromising summer vacation. While the other kids are out having fun, Ben spends these precious few weeks attending bible classes, having driving lessons with his overbearing and overly religious mother (Laura Linney) and helping out at a local old people's home. It’s certainly not his ideal summer but, with a demanding, vigilant mother and a passive vicar for a father, Ben is anything but in control of his own destiny.
Ben's absurdly straitlaced world is turned upside down when he gets a job assisting Evie (JULIE WALTERS)
, an eccentric retired actress. Vulgar, dignified and childish all at once, Evie enters Ben's life with a cataclysmic force. Suddenly caught between two worlds, Ben starts to gravitate towards his employer's unconventional and often bizarre ways, even though it continually gets him into trouble with his mother.
Evie drafts Ben as her partner in a series of adventures, culminating in a camping trip that turns into a road trip when she cajoles unlicensed Ben into driving her to the Edinburgh Festival. Ben reluctantly ignores his conservative instincts and jumps behind the wheel.
What follows is a journey in which Ben and Evie help each other move forward in their radically different lives, as Ben is forced to confront how he was brought up and who he wants to be."
Some characters of Driving Lesson can be very cynical, but this is a really honest movie. Through every thing that happens in Ben’s life since he meets Evie, we can see how people can live a life of blindness. This strange relation they develop is so pure and even better in a viewer perspective because of poetry (literally) that connects them. On the other hand, we can see a typical british family, and the hypocrisy that sometimes a life devoted to church can bring to a house.
This movie has all the characteristics of an independent movie: not a really fantastic story, but a story told in a fantastic way. Great supporting characters and an end, that is not happy, but it causes you a smile in the face. Simple, but good.
To finalise, I’d like to stand my favourite scene, the one that shows all the essence of the movie. When Ben and Evie start to perform Shakespeare plays in the garden, we can observe the transformation in the teenager behaviour, by the way he allowed himself to be authentic by the first time in his life. This sequence, which plays with Shakespeare’s dialogues through images, has a large combination of camera perspectives and a very original editing. It ends with the two of them, lying on the floor laughing, like if only through the poetry and drama, they can achieve true happiness.

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