rm | A Very Long Engagement

I'm not even really sure I can talk about it yet, but go see A Very Long Engagement. It is an exceptional, exceptional film, that really really shook me up. I will warn you though it's complex and exhausting, and you have to keep careful track of names and faces -- I was struggling in places, and I didn't have to read the subtitles 60 - 70% of the time... if you had to read too, I dunno... it's hard work. But it's just a gorgeous movie.

But also, Tchéky Karyo is in it, in just a minor part. But he always makes me happy.

Very occassionally, I will have the sensation, not quite of deja vu, for the sensation always seems more abrupt and less vague than that, of remembering something I hadn't known I'd forgotten. It's happened to me maybe five or six times in my life, once or twice during a film, once while reading tarot cards, once in a dream, once while making love and once in a restaurant when I was very small. Only the time from when I was very small seems entirely unconnected from the others.

At any rate it happened to me during this movie, which really, considering my insanities and the fact that obviously Jeneut's films with his lost, broken and persisitent children are necessarily going to speak to me, may not say anything at all about the film. Really, in a way, I would prefer that to be the case. But it's just... very strange thing.

Mathilde is a magical thinker. If the tickettaker comes before she counts to seven, her fiance is alive. She would be more sure of this, but she didn't get to the bend in the road before his car passed when he went off to war, and she had declared that one of her little tests too.

When I was in high school, I would balance odd things on the wrong edges and say, "if I get to ten before this falls, I will not die" in one particular way or another, according to my phobia of the week. Invariably, I would go for the best of three, then five, then seven and so on, until I got tired and fell asleep on the floor of my room surrounded by my portentious stuffed animals, only to be woken up by my mother for dinner.

But that was not what I'd forgotten.