Madame Sousatzka | 1988
- Locations |
- London
- DIRECTOR |
- John Schlesinger
Imperious Russian-American piano teacher Madame Sousatzka (Shirley MacLaine) coaches the gifted Manek (Navin Chowdhry), son of immigrants, until he is ready to move on, in this small-scale drama co-written by director John Schlesinger and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the regular screenwriter of the Merchant-Ivory team.
The film is set in Notting Hill of the Eighties, a place of builders' skips, scaffolding and 'For Sale' signs as London's property boom was turning the notoriously run-down bedsitland into the artsy and expensive middle-class enclave we know today.
Sousatzka's flat is 10 Stanley Crescent, in one of a pair of houses facing down Stanley Gardens to the Victorian Classical St Peter's Church.
It's hard to believe this was so recently cheap housing.
The change is reflected in Sousatzka's cinematic neighbours. Back in 1972, number 9 Stanley Gardens, a couple of doors away, was the scruffy boarding house occupied by small-time swindler Charlie Tully (TV comic Dick Emery) in Ooh... You Are Awful!. By 2015, number 1 Stanley Gardens – the grand block opposite Madame Sousatzka's, was home to James Bond (Daniel Craig) in Spectre.
The school concert where Madame Sousatzka first sees Manek playing piano is The Heathland School, Wellington Road South, Hounslow in West London.
