I was pleased to track down this lesser-known Film 4 production from the mid-80's, set in my native Glasgow. It's very much post-Bill Forsyth with its everyday locations and quirky characters even if it posits at its heart the old religious faith v atheistic scepticism argument although as you'd expect, it doesn't do so in a deadly serious way.
Events centre around a Catholic school in Glasgow for struggling girls and boys, the Blessed Edith Semple School, which is trying to claim sainthood for its namesake and founder for publicity and no doubt fund-raising purposes. To do this there must be three verifiable miracles which can be accredited to her influence and they're off to a flying, or should that be walking start, when one of their crippled young students gets up and does just that. So the search for numbers two and three is definitely afoot, although Tom Conti's teacherly cynic-in-residence character, Vic Matthews, doesn't believe any of it. He has his own problems anyway as he's just discovered he's suffering from an incurable brain tumour.
An intuitive and sympathetic teacher, he takes his class with a mixture of humour and empathy but can't get through to one young boy in particular who's perennially at the bottom of the class and seems uncommunicative, even to him, Ewan Bremner in his debut role as Stevie Deans. So he makes it his personal mission to try help the youngster out, especially as the school's rather severe headmaster, David Anderson, wants to pack Stevie off to a special school.
Also into Vic's orbit comes the pretty new female music teacher, Ruth Chancellor, a young Helen Mirren whom he initially awkwardly tries to woo. Then strange things start happening to him, he runs a bazillion red lights unscathed n his car to prove a point to his passenger Ruth and his stereo plays without being plugged-in culminating in an incredible physical feat of his, when he makes like Spiderman to try to talk down another youngster who's got up on the school roof in an attention seeking manoeuvre of their own. Naturally, it's not long before this story flies with the media with Vic as the reluctant focal point. But the biggest unexplained occurrence is just around the corner...
As I expected, the humour here is gentle and warm. The film doesn't try to lead the viewer to any favoured conclusions leaving the subject of whether or not to believe, down to the audience themselves. Anyway, Vic's much more interested in the welfare of his pupils as well as his stop-start courting of the initially resistant Ruth, than whether the school gets recognition from the Vatican.
It has to to be said that the acting of the child actors is occasionally rather amateurish and it's also blessed, (no pun intended) with an especially dated pop-synthesiser soundtrack which made me wince with every blast of it. Conti is highly personable as Matthews and is nicely supported by Mirren, Anderson and a young David Hayman as another of his teacher colleagues. It goes without seeing that it was highly pleasurable for me to identify in the location shots, familiar parts of my city as it was when I was younger.
I felt the film could have perhaps benefited with a little more humour and drama, but nevertheless it was a pleasant watch and definitely worth looking up on my part.
