There is on IMDB a reviewer of the wonderful movie Before Sunset who says
I remember a line that says “nothing that is complete breathes”, and I think that is what we see in this film. A perfect connection with another human is a blessing and a curse; having experienced perfection a part of us stops breathing, unable or unwilling to mar the perfection of that memory.
How truthful!
“What is coincidence? I don’t believe in coincidences”. This is what Hendrik van der Zee (“from the sea” in Dutch), aka the Flying Dutchman, says to Pandora Reynolds when she sees her face on the painting he is making the first time they meet in the film “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman“. He’s painting Pandora, the first woman in Greek mythology (watch video of the scene at the end of this post).
The film is about the legend of the Flying Dutchman, a XVII-century man who, after killing his wife for jealousy, is doomed to wander over the seas until he finds a woman who is ready to die for him. It is set in the 1930s in the Spanish port of Esperanza, where a group of wealthy British and American friends, including Pandora Reynolds from Indianapolis, live. The arrival of a boat with Hendrik van der Zee, changes everything.
This film has been with me from the beginning of my life, because it was filmed where my mother and her family spent her summers as a child and a teenager, Tossa de Mar, in those times a paradise (the movie starts with a dialogue between fishermen in Catalan). In fact, my mother, who was 8, was filmed with her dog, though the scene was cut from the final version. She remembered very well all about it, and she has told us the story many times, including how Ava Gardner revolted the whole town! I always wanted to see the film, but never did. Yesterday, I did it by “coincidence”, in the last minute I went to the BFI to see a movie, and there it was the only one showing at that time, a restored version of “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman”. I didn’t realise it was the same movie my mother talked to me about some many times – she always used the Spanish title of the movie – until I heard the fishermen talking.
I’ve taken very long to do it, but it seems that fate wanted me to see it now, not before. From the beginning to the end, the whole movie is full of references to things that cover my life today.
Tonight, I went to the BFI (British Film Institute) to watch Antonioni’s L’Avventura. I really liked it. It is about a man and a woman who start a relationship after the woman who is his lover and her friend suddenly disappears in a boat trip in the Isole Eolie, next to Sicilia. The emotions of loss, fake love, convenience, indifference are present together with the permanent questioning and doubts of the human being about his/her emotions. I am happy I went tonight to the movies.
While in Brussels, on Saturday 5/3 I went to the movies. In the last minute, I bought a ticket for Tom Ford’s A Single Man, a movie that was recommended by a friend of mine on Facebook. It was exactly the movie that I needed at that moment. A piece of art, and a beautifully dramatic/sad story. It is about an English school teacher trying to cope with the death of his partner, Jim, who died in a car accident eight months earlier after fifteen years of relationship. The whole movie is about the day he is planning to commit suicide, while life slowly shows him how beautiful it can be, despite (or perhaps partly because of) the pain and tragedy it contains. Utterly recommendable if you like good cinema.
Just saw ‘A serious man‘, the last movie of the Coen brothers, and I loved it. They are back to Barton Fink, though even better. There is something of it that reminds me of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. It is this existentialist jewishness that we can also find in Franz Kafka, where the individual keeps banging his head against social norms and a system that doesn’t understand him, and he doesn’t understand, either. While he tries to adapt once and again. Genius.
