if....
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
This review is a part of the Palme d’Or Project: a review of every single Palme d’Or winner at Cannes Film Festival. if…. won the fourteenth Palme d’Or — temporarily reverted back to the Grand Prix — at the 1969 festival (1968 was skipped as Cannes was cancelled in support of May 68).
The film was selected by the following jury.
Jury President: Luchino Visconti.
Jury: Chinghiz Aitmatov, Marie Bell, Jaroslav Boček, Veljko Bujajić, Stanley Donen, Jerzy Glucksman, Robert Kanters, Sam Spiegel.
Warning: the following review discusses sensitive subject matter, particularly the topic of school shootings. There are also potential spoilers for the film if…. in this review. Reader discretion is advised.
It can feel strange to try and champion a film like if…. in today’s climate where school shootings happen quite frequently, and it actually is one of two Palme d’Or winners about this particularly tricky subject. The other is Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, which was made after the Columbine shootings (and takes on a much darker, serious approach to the discussion of how these assailants are made). if…. is a satire, and so its gruesome climax will most likely not sit well with viewers in this day and age, but I assure you that Lindsay Anderson has something important to say. It has less to do with the promotion and justification of opening fire than it does the backfiring of a strict schooling system. if…. could not be made today, nor should it be made today. To understand it is to go back to 1968 and see why it was made back when the concept of a person shooting up a school was highly unlikely.
When Anderson made if…., the topic he was challenging was the public school system in England where boys were constantly abused; it’s the same system that Roger Waters commented on whilst writing the lyrics for Pink Floyd’s The Wall. if…. is also an unrealistic picture where its goings-on are highly staged and written specifically for Anderson’s points about Britain and its forms of education to land. As a result, it also becomes an allegory for politics, civil wars, revolutions, and anarchy. If the younger generation were to cause an uprising within the only places they are permitted to go to, what would it look like? There’s no coincidence that if…. sounds like a hypothetical title, and you should know instantly that it functions as a daydream, a brainstorm, or a thought stated out loud. None of this is meant to be taken seriously as a suggestion by Anderson. All of this is to be broken down, studied, and even counterclaimed. These are the thoughts of an edgy student stuck at their desk and getting all of their negative toxins boiling to the point of delirium. We aren’t even necessarily rooting for these students once we reach the biggest “what if” moment of the film. We’re just presented this argument and are left to conclude it ourselves (particularly with the slightly open ending). What does if…. make us feel? This inquiry enough stuck with the Cannes jury when if…. was awarded the Palme d’Or.
if…. was made during a different time, when its still-controversial climax was a part of a different debate than how it would be read today.
The lead character is Mick Travis, played by a then-fresh Malcolm McDowell, and it goes without saying that if…. acted as the perfect audition tape for A Clockwork Orange (where he also plays a relentless juvenile delinquent). McDowell is in his prime here and he is purposefully insufferable; then again, I imagine this is how it feels to be an old-enough adult watching his character, because I understood him a bit better when I first saw the film as an undergraduate student. Like A Clockwork Orange, there is a fascinating point here about the overuse of control and how it achieves the opposite result than what is intended. Instead of obedience, you’ll have chaos. Whilst there isn’t any focus on the end results of brainwashing (outside of what if…. may be stating about the homogenization of society through the education system), we do have a peek at what it looks like when free spirits are pulled back far enough to the point of breakage.
It’s not easy to talk about if…. because of how much the film relies on your own assessment of its exhibitions. How do you feel about everything that goes on? Should you side with the students (and Mick’s army) or the teachers? Should you side with anyone? It only makes sense that it is impossible to view if…. without our current lens of the atrocities that happen around the world (and particularly in the United States), so we may have a more obvious answer than we once did. That wasn’t the film that decided for us, however. It’s still a shame that the satirical side of this is gone, because, once again, society has gotten so out of control that exaggerated hypotheticals in these stories wind up being less bizarre than reality. if…. is still created with a distorted lens that begs you to question what you are seeing, including surreal moments and other forms of distancing from the norm. A film that’s highly against the orthodoxy of the public school system has to be counterculture in its own way, naturally.
if…. is quite a deviation from an orthodoxically told narrative.
if…. feels unrestrained from conformity, and its freeform nature may feel aimless or confused, but that’s also what it feels like to be an adolescent that is force fed by a system as preparation fodder before we are kicked out to fight against an even bigger system. Lindsay Anderson likely still felt isolated and befuddled by society whilst making if…., only to spot the damages of old still affecting new generations. He turned his deepest teen-hood angsts into a cinematic spectacle that is guaranteed to repulse and push you to your very limits. In today’s vantage point, you can either say that if…. has aged too well or that it has aged atrociously, depending on what you get out of the film. I see it as a bigger-picture scenario: how is the world run that both authorities and the disapproved feel as though they have to be driven to their worst capabilities? You may take a side, understand all parties, or refrain from defending anyone, and that is your choice. if…. won’t force you to feel right or wrong. It will just place you in a spot you likely won’t want to be in, but sometimes that is what cinema does to us. I advise watching if…. with caution given its unforgiving ways if you are curious and haven’t seen it. If you understand what you’re in for and are prepared to feel torn and distraught, if…. is a highly thought provoking film that dares to take you where many films nowadays wouldn’t tread near (and I completely understand why).
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.