The Film Club

The Film Club

No School. No Work ... Just Three Films a Week

Summary

Jesse didn't want to go to school anymore. After much deliberation, his father offers him an unconventional deal: he can drop out, sleep all day, not work, not pay rent, but on one condition - that he watches three films a week, of his father's choosing.

What follows is an unusual journey as week by week, side by side, they watch the world's best (and occasionally worst) films - from True Romance to Chunking Express, A Hard Day's Night to Rosemary's Baby, and La Dolce Vita to Giant. The films get them talking: about girls, music, heartbreak, work, drugs, money, friendship - but they also open doors to a young man's interior life at a time when a parent is normally shut out. Gradually the father's initial worries are set aside as he watches his son morph from chaotic teenager to self-assured adult - who even starts to get up before noon. As the film club moves towards its poignant and inevitable conclusion, the young man makes a decision which surprises even his father...

The Film Club is a book that goes straight to the heart. Honest, unsparing, and emotive, it follows one man's attempt to chart a course for his beloved son's rocky passage into adulthood.

About the author

David Gilmour

David Gilmour is one of Britain's most admired and accomplished historical writers and biographers. He is the author of lives of George Curzon (Duff Cooper Prize) and Rudyard Kipling (Elizabeth Longford Prize) and of The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj, an acclaimed study of the administrators of Victorian India. His other works include The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples, The Last Leopard, a biography of Giuseppe di Lampedusa (Marsh Biography Award) as well as several books on the modern history of Spain and the Middle East. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a former Research Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford.
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