MOVIE REVIEWS : ’35 Up’: A 7-Year Itch for Life

It’s such a simple idea, really. Select a group of 7-year-olds, taking care that they represent a cross section of society and aren’t shy where cameras are concerned. And after filming their points of view on their lives and their futures, come back every seven years to see how both their opinions and their condition match those guileless childhood expectations.

What you get in return is a startling and unique series of five British documentaries, starting with “Seven Up” in 1964 and culminating with the current “35 Up” opening today at the Nuart. Compelling in both personal and socioeconomic terms, “35 Up” is not only a vivid look at how the child is and isn’t the father of the man but also demonstrates that, despite numerous attempts to reform the system, class is still very much the thing that tells in the United Kingdom.

That notion would have pleased Tim Hewat, editor of Granada Television’s “World in Action” series, who came up with the idea for that first documentary partially because of his fascination with the British class system. Paul Almond directed “Seven Up,” and a recent Cambridge graduate named Michael Apted worked on it as a production assistant, helping to select the 14 children originally filmed.

Though Apted went on to a considerable career in Hollywood, moving to Los Angeles and directing such films as “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and “Gorillas in the Mist,” he has faithfully returned to Britain every seven years to make not only the current documentary but also the previous three versions as well. The children he helped discover have become a powerful draw for him, and watching “35 Up,” it is not difficult to see why.

Cleverly intercutting footage from all of the previous four documentaries with current footage, “35 Up” gives you the kind of compulsively watchable glimpse into private lives one usually gets only with one’s own family, and even then what’s observed is hardly ever preserved on film. We see individuals change and change again, expectations dashed or exceeded, lives storm-tossed and tranquil. “35 Up” is very much a nonfiction soap opera, with all the emotional force the term implies.

And, as with all such melodramas, some characters stand out more than others, not only for who they are, but for how they got there. For instance:

Tony, a feisty and energetic East End kid who wanted with desperate enthusiasm to be a jockey. He did get as far as riding in the same race with the great Lester Piggott (“The proudest moment of my life.”) but he now drives a cab and gets no closer to horses than supervising his daughters’ weekend riding.

Nick, a Yorkshire farmer’s son, educated in a one-room school, a boy who proclaimed confidently at 7 that he “wanted to find out all about the moon,” is now a respected nuclear scientist in Wisconsin.

Neil, a wonderfully happy child who wanted to be a tour bus guide, has inexplicably turned into a homeless eccentric who has difficulty accepting reality.

Suzy, a wreck at 21, painfully disintegrating in front of the camera, is now a happily married woman, the mother of two, and almost heroically stable.

Not all of the original 14 subjects appear in “35 Up.” Some dropped out after “28 Up,” some even earlier, and the effect participating in a project like this has on your life is one of the film’s more tantalizing subtexts. “It makes you analyze things more,” says the wife of one subject, while another spouse opted out of the latest edition because she felt her honesty the last time around had made people say her marriage was in trouble when it wasn’t.

Though it is not necessarily a make-or-break factor, “35 Up” clearly underscores the major role social class continues to play in its subjects’ lives, and the entire series can be seen as revolving in an almost Marxist way around the question of opportunities, who gets them and what can be accomplished both with and without them.

For despite whatever bumps they may have experienced previously, the children who started out upper class, like Suzy, have as adults by and large settled into the kind of comfortable, even dull, existence that has largely escaped the less well-born types. And aside from unstable Neil, those who’ve made the biggest changes in their lives, as for instance scientist Nick, often have had to leave Britain to do it.

“35 Up” is cleverly constructed so that those who haven’t seen any of the previous documentaries will not feel they’ve missed anything. But for viewers who have seen the others, it will be difficult to escape a feeling of melancholy when the credits roll on the latest and the realization becomes inescapable that these folks, who, like family, we have always wanted the best for, have in many cases, not come close to attaining it.

For at age 35, even the happy couples seem somehow worn out, either ground down by life or tranquilized by creature comforts. The anything-can-happen-to-me brio the gang had at 7 has given way to a realistic if somewhat unimpassioned coming to terms with life and its difficulties. True, it is the rare person who maintains the passions of youth forever, but being able to actually see the flame burn lower and lower is a sobering experience. And it is precisely the fact that “35 Up” not only shows this happening but could not in good faith shrink from doing so that marks it as the singular documentary project it is.

‘35 Up’

A Granada Film, released by the Samuel Goldwyn Company. Producer, director Michael Apted. Executive producer Rod Caird. Co-producer Claire Lewis. Cinematographer George Jesse Turner. Editor Kim Horton. Running time: 2 hours, 7 minutes.

Times-rated: Family.