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Peter and John

Friday, May 1st, 2015
7:00 pm
Category
VAMP
Film Type
Feature Film
Cost
$12 / $10 seniors / $5 students
Location
Main Street Landing Film House
60 Lake Street, 3rd floor
Burlington, VT

Directed by Jay Craven
USA | Fiction | 2015 |

Peter and John is set in 1872 Nantucket, after the demise of the whaling industry, before the rise of tourism, and in the wake of the still-reverberating Civil War.  The film will tell the story of Peter Roland, a sensitive, sober, and sometimes brooding town doctor in his early 30s. Peter takes pleasure from a cozy and affectionate relationship with his strikingly beautiful mother, Julia, and he enjoys a playful camaraderie with his mischievous and sometimes reckless younger brother John.

One night at dinner, a courier arrives with news of a surprising large inheritance for John.  Immediately, Peter darkens, suspecting that John’s benefactor, a bachelor aristocrat and family friend, had carried on an affair with his mother and was, in fact, John’s true father. Burdened by his suspicions, Peter can’t find the words or feelings to resolve his fears. He finds himself unexpectedly drawn towards a young woman, Lucia, who arrives on the island and knows of startling events in Peter’s past that he wishes to keep secret. But John also finds Lucia attractive. The young doctor becomes increasingly unsure of himself, descending into a fog as thick as the rolling mist that regularly engulfs his seaside home. What emerges is less a tale of jealousy than a series of cathartic realizations prompted by Peter’s crisis, forcing him to confront what former Brandeis University French literature professor Murray Sachs described as Peter’s furtive reckoning with “the hollowness and immaturity of the illusions by which he lived.”

Maupassant’s novel was widely heralded by critics and writers – and it was cited as an influence by Tolstory, Nabokov, and van Gogh – for the beauty of its images and its potent themes of family, class, legacy, legitimacy, and self-discovery.

The film stars 2014 Golden Globe winner Jacqueline Bisset (Day for Night, Bulllitt), Emmy winner and Tony nominee Gordon Clapp (NYPD Blue, Glengarry Glen Ross), Christian Coulson (Harry Potter: Chamber of Secrets, The Hours), Shane Patrick Kearns (Blue Collar Boys) and Diane Guerrero (Orange is the New Black).