FREE FILM SCREENING: Talkin' about Regeneration
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Your support makes all the difference.There's sick and there's sick. Jonny Lee Miller (above), who played Sick Boy in Trainspotting, returns in Regeneration (15) as a Geordie soldier struck dumb by shellshock. This being the First World War, he is then sent to a Scottish country-house sanatorium and kicked in the teeth by the class system. "Officers stammer," his doctor witheringly informs him - "it's only the lower ranks who suffer from mutism."
Miller's soldier is the most affecting figure in a story that also deals with the war poets Sassoon and Graves. Sassoon is played by James Wilby, in career rehab after the debauched rock manager in Crocodile Shoes, and the impeccable Jonathan Pryce is the doctor who has to get these boys fit for the return trip to hell.
Regeneration, adapted from the Booker Prize-winning novel by Pat Barker, is not flawless. And yet, it demands to be seen. As a debate, it is subtle and informative; as an elegy, it is haunting. Gillies MacKinnon avoids cliches and shoots the Scottish scenes in a blue half-light that turns the Lowlands into an underworld of its own.
We have 500 tickets for a screening at the Odeon Haymarket, SW1, at 10.30am on Sun 23 Nov. The first five people to arrive will receive audio tapes of Pat Barker's Regeneration Triology (HarperCollins); the first 100, a copy of her Regeneration (Penguin). SAEs should be sent to: Regeneration FFS, Arts Desk, IoS, 1 Canada Sq, London E14 5DL.
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