It's very late, and I should be sleeping, but instead I'm musing about how this brilliant 30 second character introduction in an otherwise almost naive movie, slo-mo and silent and set to a Style Council song of all things, could possibly be so perfect. The editing is perfect, the lighting is perfect, the acting is perfect, the wardrobe and hair and makeup and sound and characterizations - seemingly effortlessly perfect. It evokes that profound and nebulous emotion that only exists in a rueful memory of the moment when someone walks into your life and changes it: someone who fails to hold up under close scrutiny or never allows it; someone you never want to hunt down ten years later incase you find he / she's aged poorly or amounted to nothing; someone who changes you by embodying all of your dreams which eventually slip away, who shows you a new reality which isn't real at all, and compared to whom you feel more deserving and yet also more inadequate than you ever thought possible.
It was like the 30 second music video remake of The Great Gatsby. I watched it a dozen times, like a car accident, and it was the same each time.
I'm inspired and empty. This is the kind of story I would tell in my biography, after a long and influential career as a film director, of the moment when I knew what I wanted to be. If I were that sort of person. If I had had that sort of privilege. But instead I have a heart like an air balloon, beating next to a pin.
