The BOOKSHOP

We enjoyed our visit to New Zealand. It was tremendous. It was tremendously surprising even with preparatory mentions from travellers before of wide eyed beauty and dazzling displays of why it is we might want to keep living, well one of the reasons anyway. The reason is the gift of our natural world and New Zealand is jam packed with it all. It sincerely did take my breath away.

The only one down side, a little, to our holiday, was watching “The Bookshop” on a return flight to Australia. I want to be a positive person. I actually really do. Well, within reason that is, so sometimes you have to call it like you see it, or, more to the point, actually how you feel it. It’s not to be a mean girl. It’s not to complain. It’s to simply to be heard even if it’s by one self, so to purge feelings of unrest. On a positive note, I actually love bookshops. That’s what caught my attention. It’s the reason I chose to watch the movie above any of the others on offer. I love bookshops though they seem to be a dying art these days. As a teenager I used to travel all the way over from Eltham Victoria to Prahran where a tiny bookshop in Greville Street stood amongst a jumble sale of vintage wares. It was packed to the rafters with books, second hand and new with step ladders and a lady who seemed to know everything about everything and especially books.  What’s more she actually really wanted to talk about books. I miss those days.

The movie to be fair, wasn’t all bad actually. Okay maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough to be positive, let’s see….The acting was solid! The acting was delivered well all round really. It’s especially hard sometimes to watch child actors in movies wrestle with their developing skills and I’m rarely convinced but Honor Kneafsey was true to her name, quite the honourable mention. The rest of the cast also matched the kind of polish and finesse you might want from this story.

The direction was solid. The quirks of a small town world where captured nicely in a way that reminded me of  Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas, via the storybook palate of the costumes and set dressings. Yes, it was a well-dressed movie in a sense that you might be looking inside a dolls house with Ibsen but getting the flavour of something mildly melodramatic too, perhaps like we all are.

The part of the movie I had difficulty with was the inclusion of the “Lolita” storyline.  Its’ not because it shouldn’t have included a reference such as this but because of the way in which the subject matter was handled. It seems Hollywood is just a little bit too rooted in its fascination with paedophilia. The Entertainment industry doesn’t exactly have a clean slate where professional conduct is concerned in relation to workplace safety. Sexual misconduct seems to have been finally outed as not ok in a world where it would be very easy to convince employees, especially very young ones that sex for work is ok. Clearly it is NOT. And that includes having to flash your bare booty in a thong simply to impress the powers that be that you deserve to graduate from modelling to a movie role. It is quite honestly not ok to put young people in these kinds of relationships and it happens all the time and is very unprofessional. Nudity can be a beautiful element of art but it can also take on a seedy place in the hands of those with neither taste more regard for more than just making a buck out of people or even worse, wanting to control people. 

Lolita is a truly hideous book to be honest that kinda paints the victim of sexual abuse as a “bad” little girl. To include this text in The Bookshop as the subject of controversy for the township is not so much misplaced but it breezes over completely the content and actually seeks to herald the book as something of a literary positive. The characters we are elicited to grow fond of are actually suggesting the book is a good read and the townsfolk who we are supposed to see as dull and conservative tut tut their way into our thoughts before there is time for anyone to make up their own minds. Including this text could have been done with more discussion and a deeper analysis of something very serious via some more rounded adaptations of the characters. Perhaps the original book The Bookshop which was the original inspiration, needed to do this too. I haven’t in fact read that book though. With Hollywood being in so much deep water over allegations of sexual misconduct and deeply rooted systemic abuse of children seeming to be crawling out of the woodwork, this movie was insensitive to history and I would go so far as saying it came across a little as a condoning of sexual abuse and that’s simply just not ok.

I was upset by this movie. In Hollywood I suppose it’s a cut throat world. The competition is fierce. Sometimes actors or directors etc. might take what’s on offer , even with some misgivings and so we have some real gaps in what is best practice as people turn a blind eye, forget to take their time when making choices are not encouraged or allowed to work collaboratively with actor’s scriptwriter’s designers alike in developing and adapting stories so that opinions can be aired in the formation of work. Sometimes perhaps they simply don’t care enough. Sometimes I can’t help but think Hollywood is sometimes old fashioned and controlled by the wealthy a little bit too much which is why there are so many issues that are coming forth in the media about a world that is supposed to make people shine.

Still the movie did make me think about life. It made me decide that in contrast to the book’s bleak ending, there could most certainly still be more Arts precincts that have a bookshop too and that today we should be preserving history still, encouraging reading of print books (especially second hand books which save on paper) even with the digital age on fire. We can still do both and have an Art gallery too. We can make reading books fun again for children and    adults. It’s really all about how you do it and how we work together to make it happen. We can continue to encourage spaces where people can read and talk about reading, in libraries in shops, in some places you might not even traditionally read books, somewhere quirky, somewhere that makes people feel loved.  Theres a chance for books and coffee, books and boats, books at the roller skating rink, digital books on the back of a trains seat, book groups, poetry clubs and more dead poet’s societies, books and a communal hot spring relaxation session, book talks in swimming pools on a hot day, books in the garden as pictured in the Indian garden bookshop (in someones home) I found …. And on the list goes. We still need books. We need love not power. People make mistakes, some are pretty unforgivable and some can be rectified too. We all just need to feel connected. Movies and books and artworks are wonderfully transformative even if it is to spark differences of opinions but it can also be a uniting force and that’s the best gift of all.