She was talking to a friend on the phone the other day, and as phone conversations between interesting people so often do, this one was ending at five in the morning, and she observed that she could talk to her friend from sunrise to sunset (or sunset to sunrise, I’m just reconstructing roughly!), and then he cried, "Have you seen those movies?!"
She had not, in fact, seen Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (which by the way till I just looked them up on Wikipedia, even having seen both, I thought were called Before Sunrise and After Sunset,) so she got the CD of Before Sunset and saw it, not knowing it was the sequel. Anyway, I asked her how it was, and she didn’t like it. I asked why, and she said the man in the movie was obsessed with sex, and she thought that made the whole movie abusive.
Now, I’ve seen this movie once, about a year ago, and after watching the prequel, and I have no recollection of having made any such observation. In fact, I really liked the movie, and I thought it was a beautiful story, not incredibly original, but then people’s stories rarely are.
I told her maybe she should watch it again when she was happier! She’s not usually one for sop in movies (which is not always true about real life), while I, I think would die without the quantum of magic and coincidence in my life that I need, to keep me going.
I suppose her reaction to the movie just goes to show again, what I have suspected for a while; whatever is on your mind superimposes itself on what you do; Milan Kundera is right. I’m half-way through his The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and I know exactly what he means when he says Tereza would always be sentimental about Beethoven because he was playing on the radio when she first met Tomas, the man she would fall in love with, at the restaurant she worked at. "One cognac, please", Tomas’ order, and his first words to her, are not just his words then, they are a message.
Kundera writes,
[in Part Two: Soul and Body, Ch. 9, pg 48 of Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition]
" …Tomas [felt]…uneasy at the thought that his acquaintance with Tereza was the result of…improbable fortuities.
But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?
"Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.
[in Ch. 11, Pg 51]
"…If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed that the radio was playing Beethoven (though the meeting of Beethoven and the butcher would also have been an interesting coincidence). But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty."
It may not always sound so great, apparently; as my friend superimposed her anger and feeling of being betrayed onto the film, I remember the time I was watching Ido Tadmor on stage recently (April 2008). I was there by myself; I am so used now to finding no one to accompany me on my adventures in Delhi's cultural circuit that I don't even bother asking any more. I sat there in the hall, strangers all around me, not a familiar face in sight (unless you count Manish Arora whom I spotted there!) and it was as if he danced only for me, an art form that was formless, fluid, born of emotion, desire, experience, and not of a need for structure. Where there is no form, your mind can shape an experience into whatever it pleases, with or without your knowledge, whether you like it or not. I was sad that day; maybe sad is not the word, but I was mighty confused, and terribly lonely. The guard that we carry around with us is rarely let down easily; sometimes it is raised higher amongst strangers, sometimes we create strangers out of our friends. Maybe it's just me; but I know my voice changes in genteel company, I talk differently in different situations, and along with that manner of speaking comes a manner in general, I dress differently, I walk differently. I sat there in the auditorium with my guard up, a mile high, and feeling stiffly that this dance thing was going to be a damp squib. Then I looked around, still lonely, and seeing no one familiar or friendly around, I realized that since it didn't matter anyway what I did there that night (no one would recognize me) and there was anyway no one to whom I could confess that I was lonely, I might as well enjoy the show. So I tried, I really tried to grasp what was happening on stage; as it happens the opening song was not to my taste, but the next song was beautiful, his movements suddenly took on new meaning, the tune was a sad one, or so I thought. I'll never know, unless I hear that music again when I am happy. It was beautiful in the way an ancient building up in the mountains is. You feel a wrench, knowing its day of glory is passed and you can never see it in the form in which it was built, but that very sense of history and kahani [tale] behind it makes it the more beautiful. It a is a beauty tinged with sadness, like #20, Barakhamba Road.
I came out of the hall that day taking home with me an experience I will not forget soon; it was the beauty born out of the weight of my own soul, perhaps, that created that experience. I almost began to cry sitting there amongst strangers, not a familiar face in sight; I pulled myself together then, not seeing the point of a public catharsis. My guard went up again, and it could have been banal again, some new-age dancer, some arty-farty stuff; but no. It was beautiful even after I became myself, for in that brief moment I had lost myself to something outside of myself; little knowing that in reality, even what I saw was not merely what I saw, but what I read into what I saw.
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