Thursday, February 08, 2007

love and the desert


" Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless." The Sheltering Sky

She and him....
Voyagers, not tourists...Tourists in the seek of their love..those days and these days..from a hotel to another...mysophobia in a glass of ice, for the coke that couldn't be diet. Fever, shivering, love cried in a hotel door.. a cruel bullet shot from the hills, blood, love shown in a small, dark house.
Desert as you could see with your eyes.



Two couples in Africa, in the verge of their separation. One shown by Bernardo Bertolucci in The Sheltering Sky, one by Alejandro González Iñárritu in Babel.
The American artist couple Port and Kit Moresby travels aimless through Africa, searching for new experiences that could give new sense to their relationship. The Journey leads, yet, only deeper into dispair. The typhoid fever kills Port, the journey throuhg the desert ruins Kit's minds.
Excellent acting: Debra Winger,John Malkovich and wicked Timothy Spall.
Lovely scenes: Kit and Tunner dialogues, Kit trying to find a hotel for ill Port, Kit held hostage.

Susan and Richard travel to Morocco, trying to reinvent a couple broken by the death of a baby.
What was the Japanese guy doing in Morocco? Why did he give his riffle to his guide, as a present? Why did the guide's kids take the riffle and then play on the hills, shooting cars? A shot, and the whole world shivers: Susan, American mother of two, is hurt. She and her husband are not able to get home, in time, to their kids. The nanny can't go, now, to her son's wedding, in Mexico, so she takes the little ones with her. And the Japanese's daughter is the one that found her mother dead, after she shot herself in the head, with the same gun. Each storyline deals with family and conflict from the inability to communicate or to understand.
Excellent acting: Rinko Kikuchi, Gael García Bernal ( still haven't seen the La science des rêves :( ), Elle Fanning ( yes, Dakota's sister) and especially Boubker Ait El Caid( playing little Yussef, the plot and bullet trigger)
Lovely scenes: Japanese deaf girls in the disco club, Richard helping Susan pee, American kids discovering Mexico, Debbie's and little Mike's faces when they see the headless chicken .

I've seen both movies in the same day...and the same half moon over the same desert.

Exactly in the day I programmed to see again Casablanca.
This is synchronicity, huh?

pic found here
Music to listen: something from The English Patient sountrack, in Count Almassy's mother tongue

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What a fascinating picture!
A desert is a living, vital place.
It is like another world. It is so calm and peaceful.
Last summer I saw Brazilian soup opera named "Clone", which was shot in Morocco. There were many scenes when desert was described. After that I just fell in love with this ocean of sand.