An Anniversary
This week I have decided to mark an anniversary that means a great deal to me, and practically nothing to anyone else: 25 years ago this week, when I was 15 (I will save you the maths: I am now exactly 30 years old), a film came out in which I held the title role. It was a little, eccentric film - an adaptation, in French, of Henry James's short story 'The Pupil' - and it emerged to somewhat polite reviews, performed middlingly at the French box office for a few weeks, then disappeared from screens entirely. As far as I'm aware it never had an international release of any sort, meaning that its viewership is still mostly confined to a small bubble of people who caught it on screens in 1996 or on one of its spells on television in the two or three years that followed. (There are also, it seems, a small number of paedos or paedo-adjacent people who still watch it and share it online) For a while though - well, throughout the whole of 1996, as we shot the movie in February