Exhortative Essence of Summer

To Kill A Mockingbird (1962)

IMDB

Directed by: Robert Mulligan

My Rate: 5/5

Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) is a lawyer having two trouble making kids as his wife is dead some years ago. As he deals with the adult's world, accepting to defend an innocent black guy accused for raping a white farmer's daughter, in the racist atmosphere of 20s, he is observered curiously from his kids point of view as their hero father.


The last time I felt the childhood so close and touching was in the first or second year of the university, when I watched one of Dariush Mehrjui's masterworks, The Pear Tree. It was about an intellectual man in his middle age going back to his home town in his father's now old vacant house to have a peaceful time and location to finish his book. But his past memories of the house and people living there rush into his mind and he sees his lovely childhood, his relatives and his growing up and turning to a political activist and opposition against monarchy. He finds what he really has lost taking all those days for granted: His childhood. That house and all those childish games seemed exactly copied from my own childhood.

And after all these years I found that childhood again watching this great film, To Kill A Mockingbird. Being a 6 years old maniac menace little kid wearing short pants, always ambushing to fulfill the insatiable thirst of curiosity and that magic exhortative essence of summer penetrating in our manners, games and feelings of the world around.

That is great you know, but I'm not the nostalgic type (anymore) to tell things like I'd give all my life to live one day in that age again. Instead I'm thinking about how it is possible to keep that feeling of being a 6 years old boy alive to feel rejuvenated always... That's a question.