:: OP-ED

Happy endings for nowhere boys

Kishwar Desai

Nov.06 : At the recently-concluded London Film Festival, two outstanding films celebrated the lives of two young men which had astonishing similarities, though they lived more than 100 years apart. One, Bright Star, was based on the life of John Keats and the other, Nowhere Boy, on the young John Lennon. Both "Johns" died young — tragic but avoidable deaths. Keats, succumbed to tuberculosis at 25 in Rome, in 1821. John Lennon was shot by an assassin in 1980, just 40-years-old. Both the "Johns" grew up without a father and with a mother who was absent for more than a decade of their early lives. Yet, both men were able to transcend their emotionally-unstable childhood to leave a lasting impact on literature and music. And both are very British icons.

The more contemporary Nowhere Boy was, particularly, an excellent choice to be premiered on the closing night of the London Film Festival: it was a warm dip in nostalgia as well as a film with many messages. It worked on each member of the audience in a seminal fashion, leaving most of us teary eyed — because we all carry special memories of the eternal band of four, the Beatles. They deeply influenced and shaped the hoping-to-be-hip adolescence of the now middle-aged generation all over the world. In the 60s and 70s, their long hair, their psychedelic bell-bottoms, their cool attitude — and, of course, their "goroo" Maharishi Mahesh Yogi gave us a look and a voice and even a movement. In many ways they even put India on the rock’n’roll map — and made fusion music acceptable to an international audience that suddenly discovered itself grooving to Pandit Ravi Shankar.

Even today listening to A Hard Days Night, Yesterday or Imagine transports that generation to a world when we were all young and beautiful and none of us had ever heard of global warming. A time when idealistically we could fight (and win) any just cause — because, in the words of Imagine, we were all dreamers, but we were not the only ones.

The four tousle-haired boys created a musical cult which remains unmatched — and since each one of them was a character, they are part of us. Who can forget the "Love In" staged by John and Yoko Ono or the Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band? Their sheer inventiveness was remarkable.

There was nothing staid about the Beatles and yet they were mainstream and acceptable. Unlike the Rolling Stones or Mick Jagger — the eternal rebel — the Beatles were boys you could bring home to meet your parents.

That is why the story of John Lennon’s childhood comes as a surprise. The film is set in 1955, Liverpool. John, played by the talented Aaron Johnson, is a lost, bright, 15-year-old schoolboy being brought up his aunt Mimi. Kristin Scott Thomas plays Aunt Mimi, a conservative and strict woman given to reading and listening to classical music, frustrated by a boisterous John Lennon who is perpetually being thrown out of class or rusticated. John is particularly upset after the death of his Uncle George, as he has had no contact with his own parents: George and Mimi are the ones who have stepped in to raise him.

Noticing a mysterious stranger at his Uncle’s funeral, John eventually discovers that his mother, Julia Lennon, is alive and lives not very far from his home. He meets her, at first surreptitiously, but then more and more openly as she introduces him to a world of music and fun.

Rejecting Aunt Mimi’s admonishments he continues to visit Julia with the relationship almost bordering on the Oedipal, though the director Sam Taylor Wood is careful never to cross the line.

Flirtatious, lively Julia is the proverbial "bad girl" of the family who has been disowned because she has had far too many lovers. Now she has settled down and has a husband and children — but as she and John explore their passion for rock’n’roll music, it brings them ever closer.

She teaches him how to play the banjo and indulges his fantasy of becoming a rock star, inspired by the music of the reigning icons, such as Elvis Presley. John seizes the thought and teams up with a beautifully gentle teenager Paul McCartney (acted by the baby-faced Thomas Brodie Sangster) who has never forgotten the death of his own mother through cancer.

He can well understand John’s anger and rejection over the indisputable fact that his vivacious mother Julia had abandoned him as a child. And he also empathises with the fact that John still yearns for a relationship with his mother despite the "rejection". The sudden death of Julia, who is played marvellously by Anne-Marie Duff, is a brutal resolution of his dilemma — but it also pushes John into learning to be more independent. He leaves Liverpool — and the rest is history.

The film focuses firmly on John before he becomes a global star — and that is its greatest strength because we realise that he was, quite truly, a Nowhere Boy.

John is portrayed as a troubled school drop out — who manages, through sheer determination, to groom himself out of mediocrity. It is only a series of random events which propel him into discovering his talent and his self-belief. In that sense, it is a film full of hope — that fame and fortune are within your grasp, you only have to reach out for it.

The film does not explore the later years or John Lennon’s death — and so, in fact, ends on a positive note.

In some ways, this is also the story of the gritty woman behind the film, Sam Taylor-Wood. She is an artist who has survived breast and colon cancer. And now, at the age of 42, has turned filmmaker. Not only that, she has somewhat taken the central theme of the film — Lennon’s love for an older woman — rather more seriously. Taylor-Wood has separated from her husband and is now to wed the 19-year-old actor Aaron Johnson who plays the lead in Nowhere Boy.

So both in the film, and in reality, there is a surprising, but happy, ending!

The writer can be contacted at kishwardesai@yahoo.com