|
Film Review: Men’s Group
By Denis Bunbury
Men’s Group is a film that wants to show men engaging more truthfully with themselves and each other. And in my view it succeeds admirably.
The storyline is sparse, enabling the emotional tone of 7 men’s lives to emerge in a way that propels the audience out of mere observation and into engagement with the characters and with their own deeper issues.
That at least is my interpretation of the laughter and tears of those invited to the preview at the Rialto theatre.
Paul runs a men’s group from his home in the suburbs. Freddy, Cecil, Lucas, Moses and Alex are complete strangers when they begin their journey together. They have very little in common with each other and would never normally have cause to speak, let alone share their inner most fears and desires.
They discover that they do have something in common, all having internalised expectations that vulnerability must be hidden. As trust grows between them they gradually begin to share as they learn to listen to each other. They discover that they are not quite as alone in their fears as they had presumed.
It takes a tragedy for the men to finally understand that they must take responsibilities for their own lives and those of their loved ones. |
 |
The camera work puts us right into the face of each character, cinematically and metaphorically. We can’t avoid noticing the lines of doubt, fear, confusion, aggression, sorrow. Perhaps the scene which moved me most of all was the one in which Freddy sits on a doorstep, giving his daughter her 5th birthday present, telling her how much he loved her. No “comment”, no interpretation. Just look and see... ...the pathos.
The actors were not allowed to see a script but were introduced into a character role. The intention was to capture their first responses unfolding before the cameras. Everything that we see in the film is the first and only take and the effect is startlingly and at times bluntly real.
The ‘truthfulness’ of the film is also depicted in the men’s interactions. We get the impression as the men initially come together that each one has an intense inner dialogue that has rarely been interrupted by a real other. As the group progresses though, each becomes more visible to the others, thereby finding a reference point for a more genuinely transparent relationship to himself.
Men’s Group therefore comments on the need for men’s private or inner dialogues to become more shared and more “public”. It is interesting what philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin writes in this regard: “Dialogue is not a means for revealing, for bringing to the surface the already ready-made character of a person; no, in dialogue a person not only shows himself outwardly, but he becomes for the first time that which he is –and we repeat, not only for others but for himself as well”.
In this sense the film witnesses to what could be possible for men everywhere.
Men’s Group will show at the Rialto theatre from April 23.
|
| |