Before the Fall

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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

17 November

Myth, legend, symbol or allegory, we will generally be familiar with The Garden of Eden and what happens there.

Interesting enough, and, for some, the origins of a theology of original sin, but that begs a bigger question:


What was the nature of Adam and Eve before any of it happened?


My starting-point for asking (although there is almost certainly, as part of the theology of sin, a whole doctrine of our unfallen state) is that few, Pallas Athene and maybe Benjamin Button apart, come into existence as fully formed adults - their nakedness adverts to a state before clothes or fig-leaves, but also to the fact that (whether or not they have had sex) they did not come into being as a result of sex.

There are those who like to ask how incest was unavoidable, if their offspring were to procreate, but a better question is who they were, what they knew, and how they viewed their world. Was who they were - as well as what they knew - changed in the instant of eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?

Snow White (the pole to The Wicked Queen) only needs one bite of the Queen's poisoned apple; Neo just takes the red pill to see the mirror ripple and his arm silver; Alice follows the instructions (in the same Wonderland that Neo's pill keeps him in) and grows and shrinks. But a few examples of how a moment's ingestion makes a world of difference...

What would it be like not to know good and evil? We think of children (some of us think of the overturned legal principle of Doli incapax), we think of angels, and, though we were once children (and some feel closer to that than others do), and cannot imagine much more than the appearance of angels (except when Frank Capra and Luc Besson do it for us), none of this seems like the possibly timeless state that our pair was in.

Maybe Milton helps us 'flesh out' that notion of a state of being before culpability, or maybe our guiltiness, our sense of responsibility, failure and despair shuts out that possibility of actively identifying or imagining anything other than this - at best, maybe, the anthropologists of old, talking about tribes in a state of nature, wanted to read into them some sort of innocence or unknowingness that was never there...


I do not know, but I think, reminded as I am of Paradise Lost yet again, I shall go back to John Milton, and try to read a book on each day of Christmas.



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This is a Festival review of Now is Good (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


18 September

This is a Festival review of Now is Good (2012)

The words of the film's title, Now is Good (2012), come as a reply when Tessa (skilfully played by Dakota Fanning) is asked on a date, and shortly before something unexpected happens. Knowing that she isn’t, she has been treating herself as if she were indestructible, much to the dismay of her father (Paddy Considine), who would have wanted her to persevere with having leukaemia treated.

He may no longer be seeking an answer that would save her for a while longer, but he has not given up thinking that things other than medical science may preserve her or that there is a sense in which he almost owns her remaining life. Much to her irritation, he is always trying to speak for her, whether to a radio-show host or the medical staff (and those people collude, as anyone who uses a wheelchair would tell you that they would).

However, tellingly, when Tessa asks the Macmillan nurse (with whom she had previously been a little abrasive, as if she represented not help for her, but an embodiment of what she was battling) what her last days have in store, they are alone. By contrast with her father, Tessa’s mother (Olivia Williams), from whom he is separated, does not seem much interested (though turns out to have her reasons for that appearance), and both parents ‘get to’ Tessa by failing to understand her needs and motivations.

Adam, the boy next door (who has had his own life affected by his father’s death in a crash), meets her when she stalks out with things from her bedroom wall that she wants burnt and starts putting them in the lit brazier of garden waste. Excellently played by Jeremy Irvine in dialogue that, of high quality throughout, reaches its peak of expressiveness when Tessa and he are talking, there is a sense of advanced maturity in Adam, which postponing study and acting as support to his mother probably has brought out in him.

The frailties that surround talking about and confronting death are fully explored (as when younger brother Cal, quite honestly, asks if they will go on holiday when Tessa is dead, because he doesn’t remember the previous trip to Spain), but, for all the tears that come at so many points in the second half, this is also a joyous film.

It makes you gasp at what people are capable of, as when Adam sets out to make Tessa famous, or surprises her by taking her up onto the cliffs. Tessa does not want to be thought of as brave, but she shows that she faith to reach out beyond and disregard the limitations of physical strength, and of the norms and mores that her father would have her obey.

Ol Parker has brought his own script beautifully to the screen, with cast and photography all of a piece in locating Tessa’s story in and around Brighton. And I think that it would be no less strong the second time, because the film is built around not what must happen, but about the relationships that make it something no longer to fear.

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