MAX'S PICK When we meet the eponymous Brian, he’s in his mid-30s, living in London, working an anonymous job, and holding down a life of safe and anxious loneliness. That is until he gets up the nerve to sign up for a British Film Institute membership. Slowly, he watches one weekly movie, then twice weekly, until his retirement years have him doing a two-a-day. This slow devotion leads to deep filmic engagement and something like true community and friendship with the other misfit BFI regulars, aka The Buffs. The book also serves as covert film criticism, Brian’s private takes forming the spine of the book. His favorite opening: Pam Grier walking the airport terminal in Jackie Brown. His favorite movie, if push came to shove: Stroszek, directed by Werner Herzog. And, here’s Brian on Percy Adlon’s Sugarbaby, and unknowingly on his own life: “a funny, loving, and optimistic film, with its encouragement to anyone who felt irremediably handicapped by what had happened to them and by their outward failure to deal with this effectively.” - MA A tender meditation on friendship and the importance of community, Brian is also a tangential work of film criticism, one that is not removed from its subject matter, but rather explores with great feeling how art gives meaning to and enriches our lives. Perennially on the outside, Brian has led a solitary life; he works at his local council, lunches every day at Il Castelletto café and then returns to his small flat in North London. It is an existence carefully crafted to avoid disturbance and yet Brian yearns for more. A visit one day to the British Film Institute brings film into his life, and Brian introduces a new element to his routine: nightly visits to the cinema on London’s South Bank. Through the works of Yasujirō Ozu, Federico Fellini, Agnes Varda, Yilmaz Güney and others, Brian gains access to a rich cultural landscape outside his own experience, but also achieves his first real moments of belonging, accepted by a curious bunch of amateur film buffs, the small informal group of BFI regulars. Paperback | 186 pages | 5.06" x 7.73"
