Somersaults through the Sunday’s fading light… Everyone’s gone to bed or not here. I’m commandeering John’s laptop in the living room. The only lights are the string that circumnavigates the deck windows and the little desktop halogen at my shoulder. Il n’y a que de la paix ici. Rien d’autre.<\/i><\/p>\n
Rented Diva<\/i> and La Jet\u00e9e<\/i> last night and watched them both. The French have a concept, a lens through which they view romance, that is utterly different that our sometimes formulaic and pragmatic approach here. That was the common thread that tied the two movies together for me, which otherwise really couldn’t be more different–one’s a neon, self-conscious multi-genre novel adaptation full of visual narratives about the characters, as bright as the colors in the movie, and the other is a taut sci-fi masterpiece about time travel in the aftermath of the third world war, a film that completely transcends its medium and works on so many levels it makes one’s head spin.<\/p>\n
But the romance thing. I really can’t quite put my finger on it–I know it affects me at the subconscious level, since witnessing it onscreen produces a different emotional set for me, but describing it is another matter. There just seems to be something more subtle, more nuanced, more invested in the details of romance for their own sake in the French approach to the matter. Perhaps it’s a product of their culture. The concept of time is different there, to the great consternation of foreigners who deal with them on any number of levels. It’s more fluid, more variable, more elastic, more subject to the weight of the moment, which of course is a subjective thing, a quality which produces inevitable interpersonal conflicts of interest, an obvious scenario if you follow out the line of reasoning. The French culture itself is older as well–perhaps in a few more centuries we’ll have rehashed the standard romantic formula enough to have a reactionary desire to seek out the more essential elements–the moments invested with meaning, the monumentally simple gestures, the times completely in the middle of an ordinary conversation, with unmoved countenance, you’re overcome with the apparition of a fleeting emotion, and everything changes…everything changes.<\/p>\n
I don’t know. They’re experiences… They draw from our memories. Maybe it’s just a Sunday night thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Somersaults through the Sunday’s fading light… Everyone’s gone to bed or not here. I’m commandeering John’s laptop in the living room. The only lights are the string that circumnavigates the deck windows and the little desktop halogen at my shoulder. Il n’y a que de la paix ici. Rien d’autre. Rented Diva and La Jet\u00e9e […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}