Buy Tickets

$12 General Admission, $9 Member, $7 child age 14 or younger

Doors Open for admissions 30 min. prior to screening Buy tickets at Film Center or online now

SPECIAL GUEST: Director Jay Craven will join us for both showings for a Q&A after the movie.

Guy de Maupassant’s 19th century seaside novel, Pierre et Jean, is widely credited for changing the course of narrative fiction. The book introduced intense psychological complexity into its naturalistic depiction of a family brought to the breaking point through startling revelations.

PETER AND JOHN is set in 1872 Nantucket, after the demise of the whaling industry, before the rise of tourism, and in the wake of the still-reverberating Civil War.  The film will tell the story of Peter Roland, a sensitive, sober, and sometimes brooding town doctor in his early 30s. Peter takes pleasure from a cozy and affectionate relationship with his strikingly beautiful mother, Julia, and he enjoys a playful camaraderie with his mischievous and sometimes reckless younger brother John.Peter & John Evan

One night at dinner, a courier arrives with news of a surprising large inheritance for John.  Immediately, Peter darkens, suspecting that John’s benefactor, a bachelor aristocrat and family friend, had carried on an affair with his mother and was, in fact, John’s true father. Burdened by his suspicions, Peter can’t find the words or feelings to resolve his fears. He finds himself unexpectedly drawn towards a young woman, Lucia, who arrives on the island and knows of startling events in Peter’s past that he wishes to keep secret. But John also finds Lucia attractive. The young doctor becomes increasingly unsure of himself, descending into a fog as thick as the rolling mist that regularly engulfs his seaside home. What emerges is less a tale of jealousy than a series of cathartic realizations prompted by Peter’s crisis, forcing him to confront what former Brandeis University French literature professor Murray Sachs described as Peter’s furtive reckoning with “the hollowness and immaturity of the illusions by which he lived.”

Maupassant’s novel was widely heralded by critics and writers – and it was cited as an influence by Tolstory, Nabokov, and van Gogh – for the beauty of its images and its potent themes of family, class, legacy, legitimacy, and self-discovery.