35 Up

35 Up

Since then, at seven year intervals, this director has updated the subjects’ lives and opinions through interviews, and in this new film the children born in the mid-1950s are now middle aged persons with barely any regrets.

Before I wrote this review I referred to the just-released 28 Up (1985) video tape. I had wanted to recollect information about Neil who is currently one of Apted’s most disturbing subjects. At seven, he made up his mind on how he would spend his life: He wants to become a bus conductor directing his own route so that he can tell all the passengers what they should see out of their windows.

Between fourteen years old and twenty one however, something went wrong for Neil who was angry and dissatisfied at that age. In a haunting shot of him at age 28 I saw him as an outcast living in a lonely Scottish lakeside mobile home; it crossed my mind then whether he would reach even thirty five.

He does, still lives alone, believes people can never quite be trusted to choose for themselves and wonders if there’s ever going to be someone who will marry him. Currently based on a subsidized housing estate on a Scottish island where last year he directed the village pageant. This year they didn’t ask him back.

Most of these other film subjects have turned out happily. There is Tony from whom we learn at 7yrs wished to be a jockey but by age 14 was working as an attendant in stables. The camera caught him studying “the knowledge” during an earlier episode a yearlong program London cab drivers must complete before getting licenses; now aged 35 with grown children he likes his profession of owning a taxi business very much indeed. His dreams came true: for some time Tony worked as jockey.

Three ‘working class girls’ featured in earlier episodes sit around their regular pub table assessing their overall contentment with their lives. As for an upper class boy who, at 21 was such a snob that he declined to be interviewed again when he turned 28; now he is reaching his 35th birthday and still is not married, doing something amazing in the relief project for Eastern Europe whereas we can see he has grown out of being a snob from a different class(for instance he can’t resist pointing out a picture of a royal ancestor).

Recalling my review of “28 Up,” I cited Wordsworth: “The child is father of the man.” This seems even clearer in “35 Up.” The faces have gathered lines and maturity; sometimes the hair just begins to gray; the slimness of youth has begun to sag. But the eyes are unchanged. The voices are the same deeper, but still expressing the thoughts of that person who were already there at seven years old, somehow formed. In almost every case it has been evident that this person’s aspirations at age seven are what his or her life would turn into as an adult.

(But there is one exception, a woman who was depressed and hopeless at 21 but transformed into a happy adult.) Some of the subjects ruefully complain about the invasion of their privacy by this project. One of the working-class ladies claims that she is all right with everything about her life, apart from every seven years when Apted starts to snoop around. Others have declined participation in “35 Up” as having had enough attention already. Most of them have stayed on seemingly thinking that they are almost done with it so they might just as well go through with it.

Among other things, there is one central mystery of life somewhere within the ‘Up’ project. How do we become ourselves? What forms our view of ourselves and our world? Educators and social scientists may watch these movies and give up because at age 7 all basic ingredients for future life seem to be available, imbedded inside the home or even in the womb before school and the outside world significantly matter. Even more touchingly, in the voices and eyes of these people at 35, we see human beings confronting the fact of their own mortality.

Almost three decades have passed since those tiny faces first gazed out on an unsuspecting world through the camera’s eye. In another seven years most will be back again. None has yet died. It will go on as long as any cooperate. Eventually only two or three will still exist until none survive anymore. And some day far off in time when viewers cast their eyes upon this rare record they shall mull over its beauty and enigma which is life itself. I am glad most of the subjects of this project have sacrificed their privacy to us every seven years, because in a sense they speak for us, and help us take our own measure.

Watch 35 Up For Free On Gomovies.