Saturday, March 2, 2013

The dream (or movie)

The dream about a film, or the film about a dream, I can’t hardly tell anymore (as always happens, like a child grabbing on to the rest arms, trying to prolong the movie’s last gleams, before being splashed with light in the Lyceum, snapped out of the Sunday matinee and back to the alcoholic father stumbling home later tonight).

What remains with me is the end, something of a young lady whose incongruent face I can’t tell anymore if smiling, but nothing ironic, appears at the end talking about the characters, in what seems like a French New Wave film from the early 60s. In that last coda of a scene, the camera cuts to her boyfriend (I don’t remember the other characters) now sitting next to her, and the actor says that when he turns 60 he’ll start worrying about his final act, but for now life is rolling. At that point the young lady turns and looks at me, to the camera, and her face freezes on the screen. With that freeze-frame the movie ends. But it turns out they were all dead, all the actors, even she (the movie being so old).

I don’t remember if they knew it, that the movie would eventually come to a freeze, and hence the incongruity of the young lady who looking into the film from an outside perspective, she too was playing her role; as if actors could not escape, talking, smiling, dancing, kissing, making love scenes, as if those in that movie would always be walking the Paris postcard streets. And yet there was something about her face, about her eyes when she looked straight at the camera, something that stays with me to this day, as if deep down she knew (about the freeze frame).