Leating is a very individual matter. A body, a consciousness, a text, a book with a cover and a smell, a piece of furniture, an attitude (in a beach chair or at a desk, ready for sleep in bed or standing on the subway), maybe even a pencil to underline or flat- pressed plants as bookmarks. Or a button in your ear for an audio book. I read therefore I am.
Descartes could well have substantiated his famous last or first instance statement with reference to this elementary act of self-encountering with unknown material. From the beginning, however, there were also efforts to get reading out of isolation. Circles, salons, blogs create an audience. In the 1970s, a book club in Upper Austria consisted of an elderly lady who went from door to door as a representative and supplied the up-and-coming middle class with standard goods from the Danube region – that was the equivalent of the Gutenberg Book Guild in Germany at the time.
In America, the word “Book Club” has a slightly different connotation. In 2018, you could get to know four women in the cinema who had been coordinating their reading for forty years and had a continuous conversation about it. Vivian, Diane, Sharon and Carol were played by four legends of American cinema: Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen were all old enough to fit four decades of reading biography easily into their personal timeline. And they were young enough to relate the erotic bestseller “Fifty Shades of Gray” to themselves. According to the motto: We are all Anastasia. We are ready to let new sensual experiences tickle out of us. Or we are ready to change our life for the better at a time when other people may be steering it into the quiet lane of old age.
Bill Holderman and Erin Simms wrote the screenplay for Book Club. It was a synergy of win-win situations in every respect: the book market received a little reinforcement beyond Tiktok and Young Adult, and mainstream cinema, which had long been suspected of age discrimination, found a use for four veterans.
Four white ladies proved that you can still be attractive in other ways than as indestructible male action idols like Sylvester Stallone, who once again let his fists do the talking in the series “The Expendables”.
A few years later, Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen are a few years older but more resilient than ever. And so nothing stood in the way of a sequel. In fact, it was absolutely necessary, because in this case effort and yield are in an almost unbeatable ratio. In the case of “Book Club: A New Chapter”, this also has something to do with the fact that one gets the impression that the national tourism authority in Italy supported the film more or less one hundred percent. Admittedly, Bella Italia doesn’t need such incentives; Rome, Venice or Tuscany are attractive enough to attract a production with the themes of eternal spring, eternal youth and eternal love. The screenplay is again by the same duo, with Holderman directing again. The literary inspiration this time has less to do with physical stimulation and more to do with spirituality. However, “The Alchemist” by Paolo Coelho is only a very loose pretext, in fact the book is quickly packed away, because the “Book Club” is just going on a long journey.
Italy is a country between two seas. That suits the leitmotif of this sequel: the haven of marriage. The later in life you head for this, the more difficult the concrete entrance becomes. And Vivian has held her own independently for so long that she now risks missing out on her life person, Arthur, for good. So the trip to Italy is on the one hand a kind of bachelorette party, but on the other hand it is only a matter of deciding whether a marriage is pending – and then also for whom exactly. There are still a few surprises at the altar, also with regard to the question of who trusts whom. An American justice of the peace may be preferable to an Italian cleric.
Paolo Coelho’s message could be summed up like this: every journey is a homecoming. Italy, on the other hand, is the country where everyone can always feel at home. So Italy offers shortcuts to itself. And that’s how you could understand “Book Club: A New Chapter”: as a bullet train to happiness. When the four heroines are looking for the platform at the train station in Rome where this train is departing from, they meet helpful spirits in signal jackets, who then flee with their large suitcases.
In this case, however, even thieves are decent enough not to let important objects get lost. The only friction is a local detective’s mustache, but overall, Book Club: A New Chapter glides with the grace of an Italian small car through the few challenges provided by the script. The point at which it becomes erotically hearty is at the same time the point at which the bon mot of eating as the sex of old age once again comes true. Life may not be dough, but it also takes time to rise.
Vivian, Diane, Sharon and Carol won’t be able to read for the foreseeable future. After all, that much is clear. The combination of happiness, dolce vita and dream partnership that Book Club: A New Chapter boils down to silences all the questions that people usually read about. And readers of Paolo Coelho are of course above mere distraction.
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