Review of 49 Up (2006) by Mirabella 1 — 07 Jan 2010

5: I feel like this series should be required viewing. It's a monumentally unique work of art and a monumental undertaking. To film a same group of disparate and unique, but similar individuals, every seven years over the course of their lives is absolutely fascinating.

In my experience, documentaries don't get any better than this. This rating is for the series as a whole, because it can't properly be dissected according to each individual episode. These people are forever intimately bound and watching them grow older is a unique pleasure.

Their lives and personalities are laid bare for all to see and yet are also somehow obscure. One feels varying levels of intimacy depending on ones own prejudices and predilections, but also due to the variety of personalities on display.

While one character states, "I'm guarded about being guarded", other characters seem comfortable telling all. Interestingly, here I've just made the slip of referring to the human subjects as characters.

Which are they? Is this really what these people are like or are they somehow performing for the camera? One could make the argument they're more natural in front of the camera as youngsters, but youngsters still love to perform for others, so perhaps they're acting more naturally now.

Do we know them more or less than we did when they were 7 or 14 or 21, etc? Inevitably one comes up against the wall of human reality, which is that one can never experience another's life or thoughts.

This film probably comes closer than perhaps anything else out there though. Interestingly, it's the kind of experiment that is best viewed over time and not one after the other as I've had to do thus far the two times I've gone through the films.

This is because each film builds upon the next to such an extent that when one watches them one after the other one ends up seeing the same scenes over and over, which dilutes the effectiveness and freshness of the pictures to a some extent.

I won't have this issue when 56 Up comes out of course, because I won't have seen any of the clips for about two years. Examining the lives depicted here with a certain issue in mind (i.e. class, race, gender, politics, public v.

private schools, etc) certainly has value, but in the end the joy of the series is simply the uniqueness of the scope and subject matter. The series really is a gift and I hope whomever takes over after Michael Apted has died is as successful as he has been in the endeavor.

I look forward to viewing these individuals lives right up to and after their eventual deaths.