Your father can be the worst doom you may meet in life

Rating: 10/10 (26 September 2008)

That's a marvelous but cruel film. Cruel to us in its beauty. Cruel to David in his complete estrangement from the world of noise lost that he is in his world of music. How can you be deaf to anything but music? It is possible, even if that sounds crazy, if that is a mental lunacy. The film tries to get us to two conclusions. The first one is that a father can be right but only for a short while. A son has to get away from his father as soon as he can otherwise he might be destroyed, utterly destroyed. In this case he is only mentally destroyed. He loses the sense of time and even space probably. Time does not exist any more, which is not serious in itself; many people can live without time. But duration, goes away too and that is unbearable. When life does not have any duration any more it does not exist any longer and it becomes so static that it may drown you completely. David Helfgott is saved from his predicament, first by one decision: to go away from his father when he gets a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London. Then by the phenomenal teacher he gets in London that accepts his decision to play Rachmaninoff in the Albert Hall, what his father wanted him to play when he was still a child. The connection of the father and his curse, the composer and his own predicament, and his emotion that he projects into the music, the place and his father's absence, all that does it: he loses the sound of the world, though not of the music, he loses the sense of duration and he falls into a complete vacuum, a mental hospital. He will be taken out of it by a simple lady who plays the piano for the patients, and then from this to that he will find a bar where he will be able to perform day after day and build a reputation that will attract people and one woman will accept to redeem him to life and marry him into a new career in the Albert Hall again for a second triumph, this time with no escape possible from the stage and success. And that is the second lesson. When you run away from your father and you lose him in the process, you lose any and all sense of reality that can only come back to you from inside and by accepting to bring that inside world of yours out. But you need some helping hands along the way, helping hands you have to negotiate and find all by yourself. And David did it. The son of the super poor surviving Jew exiled in Australia after the war was able to reach the sky and be some kind of an angel up there in the sunrise dancing in mid air as if he were on a trampoline. This optimism is refreshing because we all know too many people who did not end up like that. For one of these victims of life that manages to get through, so many will never even be able to raise their eyes and look at the stars.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines