Tuesday, January 02, 2007
11:39 PM
"this city was tailor-made for love"
On Christmas afternoon, with all the shops and malls closed, I stayed at home and watched a DVD of Alan Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour that Elmo had mailed me, disguised as a GRE reviewer. The screenplay was written by Marguerite Duras, and as I watched it I remembered why/how I fell in love with her writing upon reading the semi-autobiographical The Lover (still one of the most intelligent erotic books on my list). The film tiptoes around the lovers' infidelity to their respective spouses, and doesn't tackle the interracial love head-on; the focus is on the tension between memory and forgetting, between the construction and fragmentation of a self, between personal and communal history (as the story's set years after World War II) --- and the tensions are so ambiguous and intertwined, and edgy. I was surprised the film was made in 1959 --- its fractured stream of consciousness technique, montage of war scenes, parallel shots, and self-consciousness as a narrative, make it feel so contemporary. And while parts of it reminded me of a poem by Dunn, there's always a sense of worlds and stories and unspeakable things hovering above and beyond the lovers themselves. Hiroshima Mon Amour gets away with a bordering-on-trite statement like "You give me a tremendous desire to love," and finishes with the most poignant act of naming I've ever seen in a film.
"Tell me more. Tell me. In a few years, when I have forgotten you, and other adventures like this one will happen to me from sheer force of habit, I'll remember you as the symbol of love's forgetfulness. I'll think of this story as the horror of forgetting. I already know it."
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Yesterday, I found myself shopping at LCBO for the perfect wine to go with a fish dish someone's cooking for me. But aside from the "red wine for red meat, white wine for light" adage to guide me, I had no idea what I was doing. My family almost always drinks full-bodied red cabernet sauvignons or merlots, so names of whites are foreign to me. Lost among chardonnays and pinot grigios and rieslings, I grabbed a Chilean sauvignon blanc and hoped its promise of "crisp, dry flavor and lingering finish" would hold true. With so many wines available in this country, I should make it a project to at least taste one of the different varieties and form my own opinion. My next task is to get a good pinot noir, which I've always wanted to taste after watching Paul Giamatti's character rave about it in Sideways.
* * *
On to other luxuries... I'm so happy with the Christmas gifts I bought for myself:
1. a really warm brown twill jacket with fur around the neckline and cuffs, which I bought at 50% off at Urban Behavior during Boxing Day (basically this holiday the day after Christmas when ALL shops EVERYWHERE in Canada go on sale...it was crazy seeing people lining up at computer stores and fashion boutiques at 8:30 am)
2. a boxed set of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, and Baron in the Trees for $14 (roughly PhP570!)
3. my first "gourmet scent" (after years of using Green Tea): Laurence Dumont's Vanilla Orientale, with hints of vanilla, white musk, coconut, caramel, and aniseed --- sooo yummy! Now let's see if it'll boost the pheromones...
Labels: movies, shopping
