I was delighted to see Light Years last night.
It was a tour de force. I loved the ramming together of lyrically beautiful countryside against the roar of traffic and then long snaking vistas of brutal motor way traffic., embedded in the softness of the trees and the land It encompassed the schizophrenia of the land ( this our England ) the allegory of nature , and then the scars of traffic.
I loved the children who were unique , slightly lost in fantasy and anxiety while present in their disorganised every day .
The tale was so contemporary , the fractured family and the absent mother . Shocking then too when the mothers first impulse is to buy beer ,making it more sweet , that Rose continues to adhere to civilised behaviour. The child mothers the mother.
The enormity of children watching parents disintegrate , how pitiful it was and how courageous they all were.( the image of them watching their parents from the outside of the institution is a haunting one )
Not only that but some moments of charm , the deaf boy declaring his love for Rose, performing resuscitation on the white rat, accepting his geographical no go areas, all beautifully and quietly mapped out ,like life. Full of Injury , self doubt, charm , grace and stoicism .
What a wonderful tale and a foreign father , good at his job , absorbed ,at ease with bats and butterflies and his own house rotting , curling at the edges around his family .
Then there was the terrifying old Father Time figure , half naked ,fit , running , maddened , an old nightmare, a spectre of ageing
All these vignettes woven through with flights of birds in configurations that looked like symbols but rendered up no meaning, passages of countryside as pastoral and lovely as a Samuel Palmer and then the appalling ugliness of new builds, wind turbines, warehouses, tracks , noisy roads , all of this an elaborate embroidery , a meta language for a benign form of chaos which the protagonists ride through. bowed a little , but victorious as Victors are, with life still in them
It was an amazing film, thoughtfully made.
