The Joy of Life is a feeling. A feeling familiar to any who have woken up and spent an hour watching a person sleeping, breathing, in the morning half-light, in your half-consciousness, half-knowing that no love can last. It is the feeling of those who have walked the streets of the city, seeing buildings, street corners, urban weeds, as the sun disappears and a fog starts to fall, (as though) for the first and last time. Just when you think there is no room for Romanticism any more - when irony turns human lives into spectacle and a creeping "realism" threatens to erase any notions of "soul" or "will" - along comes this sparkling, self-effacing angel, in the guise of Jenni Olsen, and makes a film that makes you fall in love. With what is unclear. Life itself, perhaps, and the beauty of loss.
The film has no soundtrack other than a disembodied voice reading a monologue about love, loss, insecurity. Like a sleeping lover, the city provides its own music, unexpected yet entirely appropriate, a master improvisationist. Although the film is dominated by evening and morning scenes, the spoken text suggests the nocturnal, meandering, futile, guilty, bitter, memorious and sleepy.
We cannot step into the same stream twice, or jump into the same ocean. As soon as the film was over, I wanted to see it again. I wanted to own it. To soothe the raw wound it had opened with repetition. Watching monks sweep up a mandala, you want to shout - Stop! Let me take one more picture! Let me film it for just another minute! We want to make immortal the things we find beautiful, the things we love. But everything is experience, and experience happens only once. The light will never touch your lover (or one night stand)'s face in quite the same way again, so that his hair is lit up, and against the sheets just so, and your heartbeat, and the smell of your clothes, and the cadence of his breathing just like that, and the sound of the subway as the city comes to life, and the color of the leaves outside at just that time of year, and the heaviness of your eyelids just so...
Last week, in Green Apple books, Fuson and I giggled at the cover art of a new edition of
The Sorrows of Young Werther. Half on the page is a close up of a young man's face. His head is shaved. His skin dusky yet unhealthy. His eyes overflow with tears, and his cheek (the one we can see, anyway) is wet. The effect is meant to be one of unexplained sorrow - the young man is a melancholic without a cause. To Fuson and me, stuffed with oily Chinese food, in the warm light of a book store, giddy with each other's intellectual companionship (if one could call it that), the picture was silly, banal, overwrought, laughable. We moved on to a pack of cards with illustrations of Shakespeare characters.
I called Rich today, wanting to discuss Batman Begins. I got his voicemail. Now that we have been apart for almost a year, I wonder if things can be the same. I know now that they cannot.
Tags: art, film, joy of life, review, san francisco
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
mingerspice's journal
7 (58.3%)
