Peter Weir
L'Attimo Fuggente

There are films so deeply internalized that it is difficult to talk about them clearly. It may be that someone finds themselves writing here, having studied Literature, working as a journalist or teacher because as a young person, they sat in front of a screen attending John Keating's lessons. And then, watching those scenes twenty years later, savoring those dialogues, this time not as a student or a young person to be educated, but as a teacher, a man struggling, scrambling to convey a spark of poetry to his students... All this takes on the contours of an immutable and inevitable ritual. But it is a ritual that today risks losing its magic, which requires rekindling in each person's life experience.

An initiatory rite through which generations pass down, try to pass down sensitivity. And the difficulty of living, and the necessity to do so well. In the best possible way, going beyond predefined categories, the rigid schemes of a Jon Evans Pritchard, the grades, the assignments, the imposed renunciations for the unjustifiable scrupulousness of parents or teachers. It is the quintessence of life, from my point of view. The unmasking of a society where even in school it instills (or rather, used to instill) beneath the surface a strict, measurable performative need and forgets (or used to forget) that those heads are connected to hearts, to a unique and unclassifiable feeling, anxieties, or aspirations. They are not walking calculators meant to report on experiments continuously.

A poetics of living, an epic of deviating from the norm, as an antidote to the hardships of rigor. I believe its discovery was essential for generations like mine, a rebirth during high school years, between a chemistry assignment and a physics one, making you realize your heart was beating elsewhere. So you finished everything, completing your studies with the haste of someone coming up from apnea. And with the infused rigor, you faced your humanistic journey, with the hard shell outside and the throbbing heart inside, thirsty for life. Juicy life.

The fallacy of all this lies in the differences between a Vermont college in the '50s and today's educational trends in Italy. The generations of adolescents currently experiencing this decisive phase may not understand much (or take for granted) the liberation in John Keating's words because they have not previously encountered the rigor of a principal like Nolan. The danger, then, is the one suggested by colleague McAllister: “You take a big risk by encouraging them to become artists, John. Once they realize they are not Rembrandt, Shakespeare, or Mozart, they will hate you for it.” Today, we are on a very similar ridge, and if Robin Williams's character retorted: “We are not talking about artists; we're talking about free thinkers,” today the critical question is exactly the opposite: too much freedom of thought without the knowledge to support such freedom.

While the life-giving force of these stories may seem dampened when declined in the current context (with exceptions, of course, as it is impossible to establish an all-encompassing judgment), the stories, the portraits, the words chiseled in the construction of affection are not. Weir's work, particularly in the screenwriting of Tom Schulman, has a vigor and expressiveness that send shivers down one's spine. Those faces, those young actors who seem born for these roles, Robin Williams's looks, the dense atmosphere that is breathed, even the stints with environmental shots: everything is in its place, a visual poem with classic, impeccable movements. Even in its facades, in its itches, even in its risqué images, this film is crystallized in a miraculous balance; it has the lightness and depth of an unforgettable work.

A balance that at times risks being naive, overly dramatic at others, but one that always stays on this side of the threshold and manages to temper dreamy hyperboles with the frightening abysses that open up. The measured style and the at times reticent editing perfect some perhaps excessive edges. Not always showing everything is useful to strengthen the educational spirit of the work, which is certainly not the only one to highlight. Indeed, precisely the tragedy of Neil Perry's story helps mitigate this risk of a pre-packaged lesson, however deviant.

Indeed, the strength of this vision lies in its close and constant relationship with its antithesis, which is not so much the principal's (excessive) rigor, but the disillusionment of a professor McAllister, who is good-natured but ultimately underestimates the feelings of his students. “I didn't think you were so cynical.” However, it would be misleading to argue that the film intends to give a true warning: the path identified by Keating is seductive, and the side effects are not due to his faults, but to the system's rigidities. In this regard, it is, in fact, a bit too clear-cut in distinguishing between inspiring and castrating figures.

Dead Poets Society does not educate on something specific; it stirs the murky and heavy waters of frightened hearts, revives the flickering sparks of boys too sensitive to dare. It is a movement that resonates in the interior abysses to unmask hypocrisies, the many false myths, to dislodge from the track of linearity many lives so carefully set toward goals that perhaps are not truly important. It presupposes enthusiasm, inspiration, and perhaps for this, it is a perfectly untimely film.