Luce
14/11/19 Filed in: Cinema
This film has received generally good reviews both from critics and audiences. It is indeed a film that draws you in, while at the same time giving you much to think about in trying to understand the central character.
Luce, a given name because his adoptive mother couldn't pronounce his real name, was rescued from a life as a boy soldier in Eritrea by a professional couple, Amy and Peter. Much counselling and a lot of hard work has produced a young man who excels at just about everything. He is the pride of the school and is destined to do great things. So far, so good, but beneath his polished public persona rests a far more troubled young man.
The first cracks in the idyll start to appear when we see that all is not well between Luce and his history teacher, Harriet. Luce, of course, is extremely complimentary towards her, and she apparently so towards him, although one detects an underlying tension. Things become more difficult after Harriet asks the students to write a paper, putting themselves as the voice of a historical character. Luce choses Frantz Fanon, a French West Indian psychiatrist who was a revolutionary and who took a great interest in the psychopathology of colonisation. This alarms Harriet, who decides to check out Luce's locker, where she finds a bag of illegal fireworks.
She asks Amy to come in and tells her of her concerns, and what she has found. Amy takes the paper and fireworks home where Luce is smart enough to recognise immediately that there is a changed atmosphere in the house. Luce then comes across the paper and the fireworks while Amy and Peter are out of the room discussing the issue. Thus begins a watering down of trust between Amy and Peter, and Luce.
This sets the scene for a string of events, involving a former girlfriend of Luce, Stephanie, and another student, DeShaun, who has been kicked off the running team after Harriet found weed in his locker. So Luce knew that Harriet had a history of looking in students' lockers. So why leave the fireworks there? You can draw your own conclusions as the story unfolds, with more than one person not being quite as they might first appear.
Harriet's problems multiply. Luce appears to be playing a psychological game with her, while her sister, who is suffering from a mental illness, is unexpectedly drawn into the fray, severely embarrassing Harriet at the school. The final straw is when Amy, and then Peter, do not support Harriet's version of events concerning Luce when interviewed by the school principal. You are left to consider whether all that has happened was the result of a master plan on the part of Luce and, if so, what his motive was. If you believe you have worked that out, the final scene of the film may leave you with more questions.
A film well worth seeing. It addresses issues of race, adolescence, adoption, societal pressure, peer pressure, and the pressure cooker existence that all these can exert on a young man with a troubled background who has been placed on a very high pedestal.
This sets the scene for a string of events, involving a former girlfriend of Luce, Stephanie, and another student, DeShaun, who has been kicked off the running team after Harriet found weed in his locker. So Luce knew that Harriet had a history of looking in students' lockers. So why leave the fireworks there? You can draw your own conclusions as the story unfolds, with more than one person not being quite as they might first appear.
Harriet's problems multiply. Luce appears to be playing a psychological game with her, while her sister, who is suffering from a mental illness, is unexpectedly drawn into the fray, severely embarrassing Harriet at the school. The final straw is when Amy, and then Peter, do not support Harriet's version of events concerning Luce when interviewed by the school principal. You are left to consider whether all that has happened was the result of a master plan on the part of Luce and, if so, what his motive was. If you believe you have worked that out, the final scene of the film may leave you with more questions.
A film well worth seeing. It addresses issues of race, adolescence, adoption, societal pressure, peer pressure, and the pressure cooker existence that all these can exert on a young man with a troubled background who has been placed on a very high pedestal.