Shine Cert. 12
Mention Rachmaninov's third piano concerto to a concert pianist and expect a gasp. 'Not the Rach 3!' It is the keyboard equivalent of reading Joyce's Ulysses or playing against the New Zealand All-Blacks - dangerous to attempt and downright inappropriate for the immature.
I learned this from watching Shine. The concerto is central to the film which tells, largely in retrospect, the true story of Australian pianist David Helfgott. You see him as a little boy in the 1950s, clad in those itchy short trousers, playing Chopin in a church hall competition. But the dominant character in the film is his father, Helfgott senior, a Jew who lost his faith, his sisters and parents in the holocaust, and resolved to lose nothing else. He loves his children passionately, but fears so much the losing of them that his imprisons them as securely as he nails up the garden fence. The violence of his passion drives them all from him, and all but destroys his pride and joy, his brilliant son.
Having defied his father in leaving Australia, David takes up a scholarship at the Royal College of Music in London. The pivotal recital of the Rach 3 in a competition, by the sweating and tormented young David triggers the massive mental breakdown for which the cinema audience has been waiting. For years in the Australian mental institution he is denied access to the ivories. The man who was robbed of a childhood becomes a child running and skipping about half-clad like a toddler, chattering and rhyming half-sense.
