Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4665 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-08-01
• Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Full Screen, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 101 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
This tearjerker by Australian filmmaker Scott Hicks is a surprising story about real-life classical pianist David Helfgott, an Australian who rose to international prominence at a very young age in the 1950s and 1960s, and suffered a psychological collapse after enduring years of abuse from his father (Armin Mueller-Stahl). Hicks has three very fine actors portraying Helfgott at different stages of his life, including the adorably wry and goofy Noah Taylor (Flirting), who takes up the character's teen years, and Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush, giving a great performance playing the musician as a schizophrenic adult. Despite the Helfgotts' compromised psychological health, Shine is hardly a depressing experience. If anything, the story is really about how long one person's life can take to make glorious sense of itself. Sir John Gielgud, in golden form, plays Helfgott's teacher. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

Special Features
Full Screen
English
Region 2
Interactive Menus

Synopsis
This acclaimed film paints a wrenching portrait of the life of Australian piano virtuoso David Helfgott and his struggles with his war-traumatized, demanding father; mental illness and asylum incarceration; and his obsession with the virtually unplayable Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 ("Rach 3"). Academy Award Nominations: 7, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor--Armin Mueller-Stahl. Academy Awards: Best Actor--Geoffrey Rush.

Customer Reviews

It is so hard to have a father
That's a marvelous but cruel film. Cruel to us in its beauty. Cruel to David in his complete estrangement from the world of noise lost that he is in his world of music. How can you be deaf to anything but music? It is possible, even if that sounds crazy, if that is a mental lunacy. The film tries to get us to two conclusions. The first one is that a father can be right but only for a short while. A son has to get away from his father as soon as he can otherwise he might be destroyed, utterly destroyed. In this case he is only mentally destroyed. He loses the sense of time and even space probably. Time does not exist any more, which is not serious in itself; many people can live without time. But duration, goes away too and that is unbearable. When life does not have any duration any more it does not exist any longer and it becomes so static that it may drown you completely. David Helfgott is saved from his predicament, first by one decision: to go away from his father when he gets a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London. Then by the phenomenal teacher he gets in London that accepts his decision to play Rachmaninoff in the Albert Hall, what his father wanted him to play when he was still a child. The connection of the father and his curse, the composer and his own predicament, and his emotion that he projects into the music, the place and his father's absence, all that does it: he loses the sound of the world, though not of the music, he loses the sense of duration and he falls into a complete vacuum, a mental hospital. He will be taken out of it by a simple lady who plays the piano for the patients, and then from this to that he will find a bar where he will be able to perform day after day and build a reputation that will attract people and one woman will accept to redeem him to life and marry him into a new career in the Albert Hall again for a second triumph, this time with no escape possible from the stage and success. And that is the second lesson. When you run away from your father and you lose him in the process, you lose any and all sense of reality that can only come back to you from inside and by accepting to bring that inside world of yours out. But you need some helping hands along the way, helping hands you have to negotiate and find all by yourself. And David did it. The son of the super poor surviving Jew exiled in Australia after the war was able to reach the sky and be some kind of an angel up there in the sunrise dancing in mid air as if he were on a trampoline. This optimism is refreshing because we all know too many people who did not end up like that. For one of these victims of life that manages to get through, so many will never even be able to raise their eyes and look at the stars.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Sheer brilliance
If I'm honest now, when i sat down to watch this film i was ready to be bored. The film is about classical music, so not an erratic story about a group of adventurous rock gods. I was wrong. This is one of the most moving and memorable films i have ever seen, whether this is because its a true life heart wrenching story or it features passion in the form of musical genius, i cannot decide. The superb acting talents made the characters come alive, so much so that the viewer feels that they could describe their feelings to the most intricate detail. I would recommend this film to anyone.

Stunning performance by Geoffrey Rush
He won the Oscar in 1996 for Best Actor in this role, where he portrays a pianist, David Helfgott, whose great carrier as a pianist is severely damaged by a nervous breakdown. The way Rush shows the ingenuity of a slightly odd mind and the influence that it has on the movement of the body is truly stunning.
Get it, especially if you love Rachmaninoff or piano in general!