Two classes I teach at a vocational college in Hiroshima are English Literature and Public Speaking. Several students attend both classes and today I'll talk about one of those students and what she has taught me so far...
Let's call her "Peach," since that is her name in Japanese...
Academically, Peach sits somewhere in the lower middle of both classes. She was quite shy at first, and her attendance is not so great, so I doubt that she will qualify to take the end of term exam for the literature class.
None of that sounds very promising, but in the first week of term I felt there was "something" about her. The theme of that class was poetry, specifically William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience and I asked her if she wrote poetry. She looked at me like a rabbit caught in headlights:
"No!"
She's managed to keep up in the speech class, but Peach's speeches are shorter than average. The other week we were working on writing and delivering "how to" speeches, with each student writing about a different topic of their choice. Peach's topic was the superbly minimalist "How to serve melon-pan."
"Melon pan" is a japanese sweet bun, and according to Peach's speech, the way to serve it is like this:
Brilliant! With a bit of work we managed to expand the speech to the bare minimum word count.
After everybody had practised and delivered their speeches I asked if there were any requests for the next topic. To my surprise it was Peach who piped up. She requested that they do movie reviews. Everybody agreed and so that's what we did, with the condition that each student review a different movie.
Peach immediately requested "Léon" as her movie. I had not seen it and didn't know anything about it so I asked her if it was a Japanese movie - perhaps an animation about lions or something...?
She looked at me in complete surprise, not quite the rabbit-in-the-headlights look she gave me when I asked if she wrote poetry, more like,
"WTF's up with this sensei... how can he not know about this movie??"
"Show me it on your phone,"
I said, and so she pulled up the trailer. LEON the Professional. Released in 1994. Natalie Portman's debut video.
Well, 1994 was a rather hectic and eventful year so I didn't spend much time watching the latest films.
But Peach's sudden show of enthusiasm, and the info I'd gleaned about the movie caused it to stick in my mind, and so that Sunday afternoon I settled down to watch the movie and was blown away by the twelve year old Natalie Portman's performance and the relationship that develops between the precocious twelve year old Mathilda and the professional "cleaner" Leon, played by Jean Reno.
[SPOILER ALERT]
Unlike plots such as Lolita or Death in Venice, where an old creepy dude is besotted by a child, Leon the cleaner only reluctantly takes her in and remains apparently immune and cold to Mathilda's advances even as the mentor-disciple relationship develops.
As for the corrupt police officer, Norman Stansfield, played by Gary Oldman, his performance is terrifying. So fine acting all round, even if the shootout towards the end of the film stretches credulity somewhat.
In short, I was gripped by the film from beginning to end and I looked forward to seeing Peach in class that week to let her know that I'd watched and enjoyed the film.
Of course, Peach was absent from both classes that week. Typical!
Last week, she again skipped the literature class, but attended the speech class, so I told her I'd watched and enjoyed the film and we chatted a bit about Natalie Portman.
In that class Peach wrote a minimal speech about the movie, so we are going to have to work on expanding it to the bare minimum. Sigh!
Okay, the next day I bumped into her in the corridor and said hello as I was passing, but she clearly wanted to talk - the shyness is wearing off, so there is some progress being made here. She asked me:
"Did you really watch Leon?"
"Yes, thank you for recommending it."
Then she unzipped her bag and pulled out her phone and asked,
"Have you seen this movie?"
She showed me a movie with the Japanese title,
"ガラスの城の約束"
In English that means "The Promise of a Glass Castle" or something like that.
"Is it a Japanese movie?"
"No."
"Okay, I'll check it out."
Somehow, I'm already trusting Peach's taste in movies as if this is the "something" about her that I had a hunch about at the beginning of term.
So "The Glass Castle" is an American movie, released in 2017, based on a "true story" memoir by gossip columnist Jeannette Walls. Again, it's a movie (and memoir) that I had never heard of, so I made a note of it and have just finished watching it - and BLIMEY it's another movie well worth watching.
I had a bit of a night out on the tiles last night so have been taking things quietly today, but somehow, that seemed to add to the impact of the movie for me as I watched the disfunctional and yet also at times wonderful father crashing and burning in an alcoholic haze several times during the course of the film.
The Glass Castle is a dream home that Jeannette's father, Rex, promises to build for the family to live in, a promise that... [SPOILER ALERT] is never realized.
Again, I was gripped by the movie and moved by it, so if Peach deigns to attend classes this week, I shall thank her for recommending it to me, and see if she can keep up the flow of excellent recommendations...
One of the great pleasures of teaching is indeed to discover that, in the words of Seneca the Younger,
homines dum docent discunt.
Cheers!
DH
Melon pan photo source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melonpan
