I am Your Sunshine

Finished the script on my way to Tainan. At this moment, I like the movie better. Even though there are more intriguing lines in the play, (they’d have seen smart-assed and insincere in a movie.) I cannot bear to see my favorite Posner growing up to be this sad, or pathetic even. Granted he is destined to be a tragic character; still, I’m much content believing that he turns out to be a “not happy, yet not unhappy” teacher.

The movie is done beautifully. Alan Bennett really masters his work, instead of being a slave of his own creation. He knows the essence of the story (it didn’t just “happen”, like some of Auden’s earlier poems); therefore, he is able to manipulate it to fit the form. He takes the advantages of flashbacks and voiceover, uses them to compliment the story but never overplays. The ending of the film is poetic and gives viewers a sense of its root – the theatre.

Having read two of his plays, one is tempted to jump to the conclusion that he’s a Auden enthusiast. But it might well be my personal adoration of Auden and my lack of literary knowledge which is so very much venerated in the History Boys. Bennett throws in “gobbets” effortlessly through mouths of his characters as if to show off. But for me, he is merely demonstrating the kind of spirit, which is the heart of the play, that one is in harmony with the entire human experience through words, through literature, that one is part of the union of unique individuals.

As Hector tells Posner in the play,

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.