IF YOU GO
David Gilmour appears 8 p.m. Wednesday at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. Free. 305-442-4408.THE FILM CLUB.
David Gilmour. Twelve. 256 pages. $21.99.
A few years ago, Canadian novelist and film critic David Gilmour found himself in a decidedly unenviable position. His television career ''hosting a little documentary show that no one watched'' was on the skids, while his award-winning novel A Perfect Night to Go to China had yet to be written. Worse, his son Jesse was failing high school and experimenting with drugs.
After several abortive attempts to get Jesse to straighten up, Gilmour struck a deal with his son: He could drop out of school, on condition that he lay off the drugs and commit to watching three movies a week with his dad. And another thing: ``No phone calls during the movie. It's disrespectful. . . .''
That is the delightfully unconventional premise of The Film Club, a charming memoir filled with moments of insight and wit. There is nothing terribly profound here -- Jesse's girl problems and even his ill-advised flirtation with cocaine are hardly unique -- but Gilmour's description of the growing rapport between father and son is funny and heartwarming.
And then there are the movies, culled from a variety of genres and introduced by a guy with some serious range. The Italian neorealist film The Bicycle Thief affords Gilmour an opportunity to discuss how ''we sometimes calibrate our moral positions -- depending on what we need at that particular moment,'' but he's just as comfortable explaining why novelist Elmore Leonard's snappy dialogue, used to great effect in such film adaptations as Get Shorty, Jackie Brown and Out of Sight, is so special: ``It capture[s] the feel of ordinariness without actually being ordinary.''
Of course, you can't take the pedagogue out of the film critic; Gilmour's pedantic observations on camera angles will inevitably bore those who aren't film buffs. Yet he has a knack for selecting films whose thematic content mirrors his son's turmoil. Referring to the final scene of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, in which Marcello Mastroianni's dazed character repeatedly fails to understand the young girl trying to communicate with him, he warns Jesse: ``The one thing I want to say to you about cocaine . . . is that it always ends up this way.''
Unfortunately, the author's erudite and often fascinating discussion of film interpretation and history tends to relegate film novice Jesse to the background. Occasionally, Gilmour will devote a sentence to his son's overall impression of a film or scene, yet rarely does Jesse explain in his own words why he so admires such movies as Annie Hall, Scarface and Lolita.
To belabor this point, however, is to miss the true focus of Gilmour's memoir. The Film Club is more about the bonding of father and son than their respective opinions. Ultimately, this book chronicles an interlude -- Jesse eventually pulls himself together and returns to school -- lovingly described by the author as ``a magic time that a father doesn't usually get to have so late in a teenage boy's life.''
Rayyan Al-Shawaf is a writer in Beirut.
