Film Diary 2024: Disappointments
the movie I thought I loved doesn’t exist, or rather, I had barely remembered the movie that it actually is.
After a month in Paris, yesterday I flew to New York for a film festival. On the plane, I typed up some notes from my notebook about the movies I’ve watched over the past two weeks. I couldn’t handle posting these notes in real time. The first two weeks in Paris I was in pretty high spirits. Though I was alone most of the time, I wasn’t feeling lonely; though I was missing aspects of my life in Los Angeles (my friends, my gym), I didn’t feel homesick. And then some friends came to visit right before Cannes, and then I went to visit another friend in London before she went to Cannes, and then I got back to Paris and I crashed. Going back to being alone all the time in a country in which I know very few people and am not fluent in the language (I can usually find the words that I need to say, but I can’t understand most of what people try to say to me outside of basic transactions) was suddenly crushingly difficult. For the first few days I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, and then last week it just became all consuming: a malaise that physically hurt. One day I would sleep for twelve hours straight. The next, I’d be up all night. Some days my mind would spin in circles about all the things I wanted to be doing, and I couldn’t make a move to do any of them. I stopped having dreams that I could remember. I could only stomach simple carbs. There was no relief.
Of course, nothing very good or very bad lasts for very long, and now, a few days later, now that I am physically capable of typing, it feels like a good idea to dig into some notes I wrote during the first few days that this was all going on. They are largely about movies that I couldn’t connect with, and I wonder if that string of bad days at the cinema is as responsible for this wave of darkness as anything else. I’m someone who thrives on routine, and I haven’t been able to put together a consistent routine in Paris, other than going to the movies every day. When the movies are disappointing, right now, there isn’t much left.
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On Monday night I got off a train from London and went straight to the single multiplex showing an American indie film that I had read good things about but hadn’t had a chance to see before I left the States. Here, the movie theaters turn over on Wednesdays, and it seemed clear this one wasn’t going to get held over, since it had only opened on one screen to begin with, and there was other stuff I wanted to see on Tuesday, so this was my last and only chance. Therefore I hustled, and made it just as the last trailer was finishing.
15 minutes later I was back on the street.
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