BOXING DAY at the GFT

Based on the Leo Tolstoy short story parable Master and Man written in the last few years of the 19th Century this film is set in the present uncertain economic climate.

The Master in this case is a property speculator buying houses for a fraction of their worth from banks with a portfolio of foreclosed properties.The role of the Servant (Man) is a chauffeur having been chased away by his estranged wife from personally giving presents to his kids , who do not particularly want to see him even at Christmas.The Master takes solace from his woes by going on a confidence-trick funded trip to garner more investments to fund his Familys profligate lifestyle.The Man is reduced to finding consolation from the bottle to forget his disintegrating marriage and doomed access to his Children.




This Guardian review captures the structure of the film of one of Tolstoys most compact and compellingly accessible stories about an universal theme in which caring for others and sacrificing your own selfish needs is the best way to attain personal satisfaction and true Happiness.

Danny Huston takes the lead in all three pictures. In Boxing Day he's Basil, a desperate businessman who leaves his family in sunny Los Angeles at Christmas to make a quick killing buying and selling foreclosed properties around snow-covered Denver, Colorado. His unscrupulous charm is chillingly revealing when he cons an old lady into giving him the pin number of the church fund she administers. His false sense of superiority emerges when he insists that Nick (Matthew Jacobs), the alcoholic English chauffeur he hires in Denver, must call him "Sir". Rose, who wrote, directed and edited the film, skilfully charts the uneasy relationship between the two men, both losers in their own way, as they visit the abandoned properties Basil has on his list.

In the film the epiphany moment when the lead character loses his clumsy petit-capitalist whimsical justifications to a point when he is willing to give his own self for the preservation of a kindred spirit is considerably short of conviction , giving way rather to sententiousness ,  the best that can be said for the Film is that it will lead the viewer to develop an  interest to seek out and read the Short Story which will be the real star of the movie.

On the note of the short story here is a Guardian review of it by Chris Power , check out the 4 comments to get a truer perspective of the richness in meaning of Tolstoys short story parables.

"Master and Man" is a painstakingly crafted parable that stays vital despite its heavy symbolism, and whose characters do more than merely represent virtue and avarice. Nikita is kind and pleasant, but he's also a drunk who chopped up his wife's most treasured clothes. Brekhunov is odious but sees himself as a "benefactor". They are trapped in a hostile limbo between this world and the next, and they are 200 metres off the road in a snowstorm. Binding all this together, and making it a masterpiece, is complex prose that has the apparent simplicity of bare trees in a field of snow.