disappointing gods
by
Douglas Messerli
Julian
Mitchell (writer), Marek Kanievsky (director) Another Country / 1984
It’s a bit hard
to comprehend what director Marek Kanievsky or the original playwright, Julian
Mitchell, are actually trying to say in Another
Country. It appears, at least from the opening scene, that in telling his
story about his Eton years in the 1930s, British-born Russian spy Guy
Burgess—in the film called Guy Bennett—is somehow explaining why he became the
notorious spy he has become. But despite all appearances, it seems fairly
ridiculous to blame it all of Bennett’s inability to become one of the head
prefects, called “Gods,” at his institution, as the reason he has turned
against democracy.
Certainly, conditions in the wealthy school were not truly democratic. Kanievsky goes out of his way to show us a repressive and snobbish school society that, at moments, looks very much like the Soviet Kremlin-controlled world. The youngest of the schoolboys are forced to polish lamps, shine boots, and do the most menial of jobs. But even the older schoolboys, played by actors who are far too old to really be called schoolboys, are subject to the whims of the “Gods” and intrusions of their teachers. And this schoolboy nightmare world, like Bennett’s home, is obviously “another country.”
Even the discovery of a couple boys
mutually masturbating ends in the tragic suicide of one of them. Prayers are
ordered by the dislikeable head prefect, as the senior students try to hush up
the event. House captain Fowler (Tristan Oliver) is fond of militaristic
maneuvers that do remind one of worst of dictator-controlled societies. These
years, after all, did lead to World War II.
Clearly, the only joys these boys have
are of the sexual kind—mostly with one another. But we know that, just as have
their fathers, most of them will grow up to be brutal and self-controlled
heterosexuals in the manner of those portrayed in fictions by Evelyn Waugh, E.
M. Forster, and others. All well-educated British schoolboys simply went
through such a seemingly “homosexual” period in their lives. Those who didn’t
grow out of it, like Forster, Alan Turing, and thousands of others were
threatened with exposure and imprisonment.
Guy Bennett (Rupert Everett) is most
definitely gay, and has evidently had sex with nearly all of his peers except
his best friend, Tommy Judd (Colin Firth), who, as a Marxist, is apparently more
interested in politics that sex; that does not mean that Bennett does not try
get him into bed. Everett plays Bennett with great panache, and Kanievsky’s
beautiful scenes of him and other beautiful boys, particularly the somewhat
younger, James Harcourt (Cary Elwes) give the film, at moments, the quality of
a James Ivory movie, a pretty-to-look-at box of historical accuracy.
Bennett’s behavior is so “out there,”
that it is no surprise that, after the young masturbator’s death, the “Gods”
are out to punish him. He escapes the cane by threatening to tell that nearly
every one of them has enjoyed his company. Only when the young Harcourt might
be “outed” does he accept his punishment.
How he went from his desire to “rule” the
other boys to become a diplomatic spy is never explained, only intimated to the
above. The Marxist, meanwhile, so we are told in the epilogue, has gone on to
die in Spain, fighting for Spanish democratic cause, suggesting, perhaps, that
they both went in different directors than what seemed to be their natural
courses.
If nothing else, we recognize that a
dictatorial education surely leads to desire for just such a world as an adult.
But then, Robert Musil, had shown us that, far better, in his 1906 novel, The Confessions of Young Törless.
Los Angeles, September
4, 2017
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