A Very Long Engagement

No photo for this post because the only photos I find are from the DVD of this French movie which I saw today and they are the very romantic opening shot of the lovers in bed. it's modest enough and, of course, as the title suggests, this might be called a romance. But it's not -- or wasn't to me. It was about French soldiers in World War I. The romance was a girl who refused to believe her young lover was dead and indeed finally, after well over two hours of movie, finds him in a psychiatric hospital with amnesia. Half the movie, I think, takes place on battle fields. All war is hell but WWI was especially brutal and certainly seems so in this movie. The movie was artistically done mostly in tones of sepia with a lot of black and white for the battle scenes -- the blending of colors -- some full color scenes after the war too -- was so well done it was never jarring.

I might not have gone if I had realized that there would be so many battle field scenes and that the story was a fairly simple, but relentless, search for information. I've just been reading a couple of blogs that remarked on Veteran's Day and also on the numbers of people killed just in WWII without adding the millions from WWI ... and then the world had all those other wars -- I should make that a present tense. For we HAVE indeed wars at this very minute with people dying.

I met with a couple of writers this noon, one of whom is a German woman who was, as teen, a prisoner of war when the Russians advanced toward Berlin at the end of WWII, taking over her home in Pomerania. Her experiences are something no Americans had to endure. To hear her continual terror that she would be raped is only a small part of the story. The movie had none of the usual glorification of heroic figures in most such movies and listening to this writer's experiences and her struggles to tell her story in a clear and direct way, no heroics although, indeed, she was very brave, carry me into a world I feel I need to recognize but am grateful I have never experienced.

Instant Aging

I feel instantly ancient when I watch old movies and movies stars whose entire life history I know appear on the screen young, beautiful. This happened when I saw Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Taming of the Shrew, now as I watched Marlon Brando as Marc Antony and James Mason as Brutus in Julius Caesar. {They were SO handsome!]. And this afternoon looking at a vital [if much made up] Laurence Olivier as Richard III. It's not fair that they remain so young and beautiful on screen. And I look in my mirror and see someone who looks so different than I once did. In fact today I dug into a box in which I'd packed various tax documnets [because it's getting to be THAT time of year] and found I'd packed in the same box an album of pictures from the 70s. Was that dark haired woman me? If only I'd been a movie star I'd be immortalized as that slender, long haired brunet.

I have a Brando story that will never be known if I don't tell it somewhere: A friend of mine who was an early Actors' Theatre member, told me this story: Back in the 50s, in NYC, he was dating a girl whose roommate was dating Brando. My friend arrived a the girls' apartment one evening for a date and both girls were still showering and dressing. Brando was also waiting for his date. The guys were bored so they decided to play cards since there was a deck on the coffee table. At some early point my friend realized Brando was cheating at the game. He said. "Marlon, you're cheating." Marlon said, "Well, isn't winning what this is about?"

I thought of that story in the scene where Brando is planning the effect of his "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" speech. The look on his faee was all about winning.