Both of these movies try to show the difficulty we have as adults of holding on to or letting go of our youth. It's so hard to reconcile bitter realities of adulthood with that sweet innocence and belief.
Goodbye First Love (Un Amour de Jeunesse) is directed by Mia Hansen-Love, who directed The Father of My Children(which I never saw due to not being into sad sad movies in 2010, though weirdly enough I watched Summer Hours, which was sadder than sad yet life-affirming at the very end and was directed by her husband, Olivier Assayas). It stars Lola Creton from Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard as the protagonist, who is based on Mia Hansen-Love herself. Creton, who was 17 or 18 during filming, has been accused of playing too flat but I don't find that to be the case at all. Her eyes say all you need to know about this character, who loves an older boy while she's in high school. They have a bad break-up near the beginning of the movie and the rest details the ways in which the girl deals with that aftermath of her first heartbreak as she gets older, goes to school, gets a career, meets someone else (who looks a bit like Klaus Kinski). The problem is that in these more mature scenes Lola Creton is still 17 playing someone years older. Hansen-Love's priority was to have a real teenager play the teenager, but if the film has a flaw it has to be how absurdly young Creton remains throughout, and why they keep dressing her in the same outfits she wore when the character was 16 I'll never know. Still, all the performances are so good you almost forget any flaws of the film. The truth of the experiences and emotions of this girl was so moving to me. The construction of our adult self is such a painful yet weirdly rewarding process.
"Life is never what you expect. Your fantasy version of the world is doomed to failure. It's up to you to create one that's deeper, more real. That's how you become yourself."
I'm not into crappy folk of the last few years but there is a song that plays in the movie and again at the end that I thought was just perfect. It's called "The Water" by Johnny Flynn, who I hadn't heard, and Laura Marling, who I have and is a snoozefest. It's overdramatic and could be insufferable in that Joan Baez way but the lyrics are so appropriate to the movie('The water can't drown me, I'm done with my dying'). It plays at the end over gorgeous cinematography of the Ardeche deparment in France while a hat floats away down the river. Anyone with a heart that beats should watch and enjoy this movie.
Summer Interlude is an early film by Ingmar Bergman that came out this summer on the Criterion Collection. Now, anyone that knows me knows I'm no Bergman fanatic. I watched Cries and Whispers in the middle of the night on TCM many years ago and thought it was somewhere between a horror and a comedy, had to watch the loathsome Wild Strawberries in psych class, and was just unimpressed with this Bergman person. More recently I watched and enjoyed and even bought The Seventh Seal. So I bought this and Summer with Monika because I thought they were my speed, and they are. Summer Interlude has beautiful b&w cinematography (even before Sven Nykvist!). Maj-Britt Nilsson plays a ballerina in her twenties who suddenly receives an old diary that transports her back to the summer of her first love as a teenager.
As she takes a trip back to walk the scenes where that love played out, we see the inevitable tragedy coming. You don't need all the foreshadowing to know glorious summers like that never last. You can't sleep in a little cabin and wake up every morning to put your bathing suit on and fish and swim all day forever. In fact, this movie has some incredibly dark moments. The contrast of those shiny summer days with the torment of the main character in the present could be off-putting or uneven, but the story progresses pretty well until the rather abrupt and somewhat incongruous end. Nilsson does a superb job and her face is eminently expressive (in contrast to Lola Creton!). The dark moments where she is haunted by that lost joy aren't as terrible as you would think because she is able to relate that maybe those happy times are just as much a part of who she is now as all the bitterness that followed. Bergman tries to reconcile these two halves of the character in the end and doesn't pull it off convincingly, maybe because the two halves can exist separately in the same person but there is no way to really ignore or obliterate either one. The interplay between the lightness of that young love and the haunting of what came after it is still definitely worth watching.
Meanwhile, I've been feeling extra lousy lately(I had my first kidney stone in July and I have to go to a specialist at Ohio State in Sept. and I'm hoping he'll be able to help) but I had a good weekend. Saturday I got up and fixed a vegan banana pancake recipe that my pen pal just gave to me 'cause I've been feeling bad or because he is a nice person or because he likes my stories or maybe just maybe all of the above. They were really quite delicious, even if I'm normally a miserable pancake cook. I even fixed a couple at the end with chocolate chips added, but I think make the ones with just banana were even better. Then I went with mother dearest to see The Dark Knight Rises, which I mostly liked. On Sunday I went to lunch with my mom and nephew and visited my grandma, who happens to live in a retirement home out by the YMCA. I went swimming for the first time in a couple months. I felt pretty good doing my laps and I was proud that even with no practice I still was at the same pace I had been at the start of summer. And then I got out of the pool, and almost passed out while changing. It was scary, and I was glad there were other people in the locker room in case I needed them. I think the blood gets stuck in my clottified legs which makes my heart and lungs work too hard. I'm gonna ask my doctor about it because even though it took forever to feel more steady this afternoon, I can't explain the freedom that swimming affords me. I wish I could teach every one of you to swim so you could have the escape, too. I heard there's a new part autobiography/part why-swimming-is-glorious book called Swimming Studies or some such by some lady which I need to read. As I grew up I loved to swim on my back, on the bottom of my mom's friend's pool, and stare at the sun shining on the bubbles rising to the surface and marvel at how awesome life can be. And I still know that it can be, and swimming helps me remember.
