"I never thought it would end this way," Johanna Carter says to him." "There never was any other way," Captain Barstow tells her. "We just put it off awhile" from the film Rocky Mountain.
A few years back we were kicking the relative merits of a number of films, Lost in Translation, Spanglish, Phantom of the Opera and Shakespeare in Love among others. We still hadn't had a chance to watch a movie together, that was still a long ways off. We were just talking about movies as friends tend to do, weighing out not so much the film itself but the weight of the message built into the movie.
You asked me over the course of June to check out Spanglish. In the meantime I found and then watched a copy of Lost in Translation, then watched your flick, then put you to the challenge to watch both of them as well. We got together by the j high track after your July road trip to discuss the films over warm strawberries and luke cool water. It was an afternoon made in heaven.
In the end I think that you felt more at home with Spanglish than you did with Lost because of the girl and her ability to break away from her true love, if only because the tragic ending fit so well with your mindset. I say tragic only because the boy lost the girl of his dreams. You said that was fitting because the girl maintained her sense of intregrity and was able to be loved by the boy even as she walked away. No families torn asunder, everyone went on with their heads held high. I didn't enjoy that part very much and, as a matter of fact, haven't watched the movie since. All too much like our own story. Why watch something when I already lived it?
After that I think I understand why I've sent along copies of Casablanca and The Ghost and Mrs Muir to you. In both cases, as well as with Errol Flynn's Rocky Mountain, boy loses girl but does so only because in doing so he maintains the high road. I suppose, too, that was the moral in that Shakespeare flick. Boy loves girl, boy loses girl, but in doing so gets one hell of a good writing spree out of it.
Maybe that's why I enjoyed Lost in Translation more than you did. I felt that that film's ending was bit more ambiguous, because while it looked to be a boy meets girl,boy loses girl kinda film, I think it was more of a boy meets girl, then says goodbye to her for awhile and then meets her again later on off camera after he gets his life in order.
Our points of view may have varied when it came to that intregity in love thing, but deep down in that place where words don't exist I think we both are sharing a cold drink together. We'll always have WALE, but I don't think that either one of us will ever think of our time as a "stolen season". And while I may be the more Romantic of the two of us, my dear, you, my eternally pragmatic one, certainly know in your buried heart of hearts that the better story has not yet been told, that the story still smolders like a glowing ember waiting to ignite, like the fire that burned brightly in Ilsa's eyes for Rick as she was led to the plane by her righteous freedom fighting husband.
M, our time was not a stolen season. It's a season waiting in a calendar that has yet to be opened.
Think of our love as a season that has yet to be lived.
Your WHMB
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