a sticky life

I just came back from watching Breaking and Entering, a new film, wrote and directed by Antony Minghella. It is a really good film but I was surprised not many people were there. I watched it in the theatre with three friends and there were a total of seven people when the film started. By the end of the show only four of us left. More sadly, they were also not too fond of the film. I couldn’t believe it. What’s wrong with people, I thought. So I will try to share what I think of the film a little bit here.

As most of the movie critics agree, the strength of the film is in the performance the supporting characters which consist of a string of fine and veteran actors. First, there is Juliette Binoche a well known French actor who plays the Bosnian immigrant single mother. Robin Wright Penn who plays the character Liv, the wife, and becomes a great balance to Binoche’s character. Martin Freeman, who we remember playing a comical character in BBC’s The Office, plays a very serious business partner of Will Francis. And most memorable to me is the acting of Vera Farmiga, recently in The Departed, as Oana the Eastern European prostitute. Jude Law, nevertheless, does business as usual and plays the main character Will Francis, a rising landscape architect in London, equally impressive.

I also like what Minghella said about London, his home city, in the interview clip on their website (http://www.breakingandentering-movie.com). Oftentimes people talk about London as a great multicultural center and sort of a melting pot of cultures. That’s a “charming” depiction of the city. But he is more interested to portray the “less charming” reality of the city. I think his attempt to describe the city this way is much more interesting and truthful than any tourist books can ever do.

His analysis is that there is a void in the English blue-collar social strata because everybody ‘suddenly’ moved to the middle class. As a consequence of this absence of English blue-collar workers, there emerged a new “invisible” class made up of immigrants and filled the vacuum in the society. Law, also on their website, described one unique aspect of the film that it is so “specific to this period”. It is a film made now and also about the “now”, such as the impact of the Bosnian conflict and the Somali immigrants for the people in the film.

With the underlying themes above, Minghella beautifully weaved several lines of interesting story ideas into one coherent film project. It is filled with metaphors about the entanglement of two worlds. It is the inner struggles in Will Francis as a husband, an architect, and as a human. It is the symbiotic coexistence between the upper middle class and the lower class. It is the tension between urban environments and its inhabitants. Through this he is trying to argue that although our reality is sticky and messy but it is also filled with beautiful encounters and personal redemptions.

A sticky life is my intepretation of the word 'sticky jam' used in the film. 'Sticky jam' is a metaphor the daughter read from a children story book at a moment when each character’s life in the film is completely entangled with each other. I think that’s a very subtle and clever climax of the story. I would also add that there is another layer of entanglement among the metaphors itself. But I will save this for another discussion when you get the chance to see the film. I would be interested to know what you think, anything, so go for it.

a painful uneasiness

Ryabovitch and Olengka (Olga Semyonovna) are the main characters in Anton Chekov’s short stories The Kiss (1887) and The Darling (1899). As you know, Chekov is the master in dissecting human emotions and feelings and presenting them as vignettes of daily life through his short stories. These two stories explore the captive power of a feeling.

Ryabovitch was occupied by the kiss he got unexpectedly in a party while on duty with his artillery battalion. The image of the mysterious woman and the dark room flickering on and off in his mind during his five months away in tents and landscape. Chekov exploits this feeling of longing that we are all familiar with when we are in love. It is “A painful uneasiness that took possession of him.”

Olengka also has a longing although in a different way. She is a woman that always feels the need to express love to somebody. “She wanted a love that would absorb her whole being, her whole soul and reason…” Without it, her soul, “was empty and dreary and full of bitterness.” When it's taken away she is lost and desolate: “In winter she sat at her window and looked at the snow. When she caught the scent of spring , or heard the chime of the church bells, a sudden rush of memories from the past came over her, there was a tender ache in her heart, and her eyes brimmed over with tears; but his was only for a minute, and then came emptiness again and the sense of the futility in life.” But who wouldn't if put in her place. She lost three husbands and a step son. This is where, I think, Chekov really pushed the experiment of human feelings to the extreme.

The captive power of a feeling is really interesting. Although I hated when I was in it. It’s like being trapped in a mud slide. Messy and stupid. But I asked myself why is it so captivating as in Ryabovitch’s story and could create such a misery as in Olengka’s story? Then I think about something different. These two stories are more about an exploration on how one can shape a feeling or otherwise be shaped by it.

the paradox of love

That's what just came up my mind... i thought that, like many other things that came out of my mind, was the most genius thing one can ever think of, that i was the smartest person under the sun.. and it lasted for 30 seconds, after that usually came another "what a crap", "anyone can come up with that"... but i will give it a try this time.. maybe my second self was wrong...

At last i understand what a perfect love is... it is perfect when it is one-sided. You can only really love someone when that one doesn't love you. That's weird, but think about it. When you are in a relationship, when you say you "love each other" you don't really "love" each other. What you do is you are just being kind because she is being kind because you are being kind and so on and so on. Maybe that's one of the "chasing after the wind" in the Ecclesiastes. That is the irony of life. The beautiful irony. Well, what do you think? maybe, maybe not, stupid, bodoh, aneh, desperate?

I know what you are thinking now, the answer is No. I am not trying to please myself because I was rejected or something like that. It just happened suddenly that i was able to steal some internet connection from my neighbor and Xenia keep asking me to write something in this blog. So here is the blog of the day.