This is a beautifully written, beautifully photographed, and beautifully acted film.
My viewing experience brought forth a lot of emotional reactions and thoughtful moments; for there was, and still is, so much I can relate to during that brief cinematic journey through time and space to an impossible romance.
I therefore come by here to confide in you all, and to share a private past recalled.
Dear friends, however, let me plead for your taciturnity:
Assume nothing,
ask nothing,
say nothing,
and if you could,
remember nothing.
Please.
***
1)
”This is why you came. This is what you wanted.”
---Mary, upon arriving in Spain in a time of political commotion.
That night, I tried to hypnotise myself when intense feelings of dread grabbed me as my legs were nearing the steps. I could feel the chaos, thinking that perhaps my spirits had been flung out of my body. Perhaps my heart was drunken. Moreover, I could well have lost my soul to foolishness. If one could deceive oneself, then I must have deceived me into believing that I was here for fun.
2] But no. It had not been for fun at all.
I came to be drugged. I could no longer bear myself.
I had enough of my own company, and was completely fed up with ’me’. So I needed to shift focus. After all I had, for too long, been suffocating myself with my obsessive apprehensions.
3)
It is you.
Your love, your care, your gaze, your desire.
Your wanting me.
Your falling in love with me.
Your infatuation.
I… want to become the object of your obsession.
But you looked away.
Yes, you did, and then you turned and delayed…
I completely escaped your attention.
You did not even notice.
You do not parade.
4)
Realising that, ”[w]e never get what we want most. We’re shown of it, but we don’t get it,” I come face to face with my agonising frustration--
When the film had ended and my aunt had gone off to the loo, I began to sob helplessly in the darkened auditorium. As if it were my life that has just been changed forever, because I had lost the love of my life, and because I was shown of what I wanted most, but was not given it.
Yet the truth is, I didn’t even know why I was crying, not really. Except that maybe, just maybe, the final scene of the film had arrested me with killing tenderness.
I sat there, feeling numb in the excessively chilled cinema auditorium, staring at the screen, watching Mary’s sorrowful face TURN to look out of the train, and back at the camera in her front. There and then, I got the sense that instantaneously we were face to face with one another.
Fleeting thoughts and emotional torrents flooded through my mind. And then memories replayed: Before my eyes, his image came alive. One Friday night…
In a hazy flashback, I seemed to hear him in his well-acted cockney accent, saying he would tell his son with all his strength and passion, that he should be free to live and to do whatever he wants to.
”I dunn care, if he wanna stab me wif a knife.”
”I’ll say, ’go on, go’n and kill me.’”
5]
In retrospect, I guess I must have been impressed by the brilliance in his eyes, somewhat diffident, yet defiantly daring.
Yes, that was how they had looked when, wearing an awful wig that made him look scruffy and with a bottle of beer in his hand, he crouched by the pavement, gazing up at me, challenging.
6]
Now, as I struggle to write down what I feel about the film and its inspiring effects on me, everything just seems to come out clumsy.
I am insisting only because this is so important to me, that even in its clumsiest form, it needs to be done.
Besides, several shots of nature in Europe have made me weep with painful desires to go.
To go back there. To return to a place where I feel most naturally at ease with myself. I desperately need to feel, once again, my feet on the grass when I walk, and hear my steps in that teeming green.
Source of Image:
http://www.cinetropic.com/janeloisemorris/commentary/talkofangels/photo2.html
