FILM: 'FOREVER YOUNG,' AN ARRAY OF FIRST LOVES (Published 1986)
- ️Wed Jan 29 1986
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- Forever Young
- Directed by David Drury
- Drama
- Not Rated
- 1h 24m
- Jan. 29, 1986
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''FOREVER YOUNG,'' the latest and best so far, by far, in the series of British-made movies on the theme of ''First Love'' now in progress at the Embassy 72d Street, has to do with several first loves, and some second loves as well. Its quality resides especially in the director David Drury's feel for a small Roman Catholic parish in England, where families still go to socials together.
The central character is Father Mike, a guitar-walloping priest, whose portrayal by Nicholas Gecks works well enough once we get past the notion of a man of the cloth coming on like Wolfman Jack. Twenty years before, Father Mike had been half of a two-man amateur rock team, and now he organizes church dances at which he is the lead performer, specializing in the numbers he mastered back then.
He is adored by an altar boy named Paul whom he is teaching to play the guitar, and looked on fondly, but at due distance, by the boy's attractive mother, Mary. She is on her own. ''Your father is somethng we don't talk about,'' she tells her teen-age daughter.
Into this restless situation comes Jimmy, Father Mike's former partner, now a university lecturer in literature (James Aubrey, seeming more at home on the rock stage than in the classroom). One of his topics is ''the cruel madness'' of love and betrayal. He still carries a grudge against his old chum for forsaking the rock scene: ''We could've been great. We could've been up there.'' These lines, a trifle too close for comfort to Marlon Brando's lines in ''On the Waterfront,'' are not the best in Ray Connolly's generally trim script.
Why did Father Mike change callings? Well, as we learn from episodes in black and white, there was this one night, after a particularly successful gig, when Mike wound up in bed with the prettiest girl in town, leaving Jimmy out on the porch to brood alone.
The meaning of that life-changing hour is, perhaps wisely, not made too explicit. Did Mike feel intimations of homosexuality - either in himself or emanating from Jimmy? Did he somehow connect his unfaithfulness toward Jimmy with unfaithfulness to God? Did the desires awakened and presumably satisfied by the pretty girl frighten him or seem sinful? Speculation is invited. Jimmy's reappearance awakens old longings and new jealousies. The middle-aged men's reprise of the title theme after 20 years is affecting.