Another one crossed off my need-to-see list, then, but that feels like an awfully mundane way of putting it. In truth, I still don't quite know what I should be saying about Lindsay Anderson's If..., because I can't believe that a film made nearly fifty years ago can actually feel more relevant today than it possibly could've done when it was first released. It rings true on so very many levels; by turns I was angry, disgusted, excited, shocked and saddened.
In its simplest form, If... is a story of rebellion and revolution within a traditional English public school - if you're in the US, that means a private school, which is honestly a much more sensible thing to call them, if you ask me. Anyhow, College House is one of those places where the elite go to prepare themselves for life as part of the ruling classes, full of arcane traditions and arbitrary rules that would seem slightly deranged if it wasn't for the fact that it's all backed by a bunch of incredibly wealthy people and has been for centuries. It's a hothouse, of course, and as with any hothouse, it's inhabited by organisms that grow far too quickly and in unnatural directions. Some of the staff and students flourish, of course, but others such as Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) find themselves stifled and seeking any possible means of escape.
I keep trying to write about this one and then losing the thread of what I was going to say, such is the strength of emotion it evokes. Anderson reputedly hated his own time at public school, to the extent that he used the place as a location set for the film, and the audience is left in no doubt whatsoever as to his own convictions. The masters are cowards and at the mercy of the senior pupils (Whips), who treat the younger students as some sort of underclass, viciously stamping down on any who fail to obey or even simply to conform. Beneath Alberto Korda's iconic portrait of Che Guevara, we watch Travis' rage at the system begin to coalesce into something almost tangible.
The film is very much a slow burner. There's no clear narrative structure, and its slightly dreamlike air is enhanced by seemingly random switches between colour footage and black and white. Apparently, this was entirely due to budgetary considerations; nevertheless, I found it kept me perpetually uneasy, right up to the infamous climax.
Speaking of which, I watch a lot of films these days, and I suppose I've been deluding myself into believing I've been desensitised. A day after another random rogue gunman laying waste to a Louisiana cinema, however, I found it hard to watch a group of amateur marksmen on the school's chapel roof, picking off the congregation like targets in a video game.
Films like If... and Terry Gilliam's Brazil were intended as overblown dystopian fantasies; not even cautionary tales, not really, because the polite assumption was that nobody could ever be so callous, so stupid, so short-sighted as to let things reach a point where the worst horrors they depict could ever possibly come true. Decades later, they seem eerily prescient.
I have no words left any more.
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