I missed seeing Caramel when it was at Living Room Theaters months ago. Based on the past couple of hours, it wasn’t a devastating loss. But it was also a good evening filler/placeholder for some day when I have better things to do.

Since I have made no promises to explain myself here, I will just say that Aunt Rose is a haunting character. I’m left theorizing my various Lilis, thanks to her.

Additionally, I think Americans should watch more Middle Eastern films, you know, the ones not made by Americans, in which Arabs live normal, loving lives and are human.

My two gratuitous cents. Night night.

For the uninitiated, Wong Kar-Wai is a Hong Kong director and pretty much is in his own category of teh awesome. In the Mood for Love was his first film I saw, and it remains among my favorites, ever. It is a tale of desire, betrayal, and loss, punctuated by beautiful dresses and slow-motion street scenes with unbelievably sad music. 2046 is a loose sequel. There is no point in telling the plot. Either you will watch it, or you won’t. If you don’t, it’s your loss, and you are stupid. If you do, you will understand why I would love Wong so much.

As enticement, I offer the music from 2046 that is in a format small enough to upload:

Interlude – 2046

Julien et Barbara – 2046

There is more–a Preisner tune, for example. I could be persuaded to make it available in -2mb format, if asked.

If you are familiar with Kieslowski and have never looked into the origin of the scores, this is significant information.

Preisner’s contribution includes and is not limited to the music attributed to Van den Budenmayer, a Dutch composer, invented by Kieslowski and Preisner, who is featured in a number of Kieslowski’s films. The composer revived in The Double Life of Veronique? Van den Budenmayer. The CD the leading actress listens to in a music store in Red? Van den Budenmayer. And, more accurately, Zbigniew Preisner.

The soundtracks to Red and Blue are wonderful; of the two, I’d say I prefer Red, and I also prefer Red slightly above Blue in the film trilogy. My bias is entirely subjective. After watching Blue, it was difficult to restrain myself from coming back upstairs to my piano and, er, bothering my roommates with midnight composition efforts. More than anything, it was the portrayal of the act of creativity in Blue that seemed “true” to me…I who still have a file cabinet with snippets of music composed anywhere and everywhere…during dinner, when the light was a certain way, in the middle of class, in the middle of an unrelated concert. But Red was more satisfying, more complex, in a way.

Thanks to my emusic account, I have been purchasing a lot of Priesner’s music. I listen to it and feel melancholy, remembering the moments it accompanies in Kieslowski’s films. They are not, shall we say, comedy. They are not light. But they are not less beautiful for being pensive. This is something that seems hard for Americans to understand.

listen: Catastrophe

Who am I kidding? I would drink and play the piano late at night. But I would NOT swoon.

At least I’m appreciating the fact that portrayals like these are far less common now, even if we have traded them in for more subtle and insidious representations of women.

Kieslowski’s films are preoccupied with connections; I wouldn’t say they are deterministic, but rather that they assume interrelations among people, between people and their environment, and throughout time. There’s something comforting about his films, at least for relativist me–we do search for some sort of meaning, after all. Kieslowski suggests that there may be meaning in what we think of as chance, and perhaps that what we think of as creation is actually a recognition of that meaning and of the connections it implies.

Indeed.

There have been a few things on my mind lately. For one, I think my breasts have gotten bigger. Really. My weight is the same, clothes still fit the same, except for bras and tops. Yesterday at lunch, I asked D, who has known me for a long time and presumably pays more attention to them than anyone else–or at least has some sort of tracking spreadsheet to chart their changes over time. He claimed ignorance. My theory that someone was monitoring them is destroyed, or at least revised. He was, however, gracious enough to point out that every man we walked by on the way back to the cubes looked at them. Blech.

(Parenthetically, this is part of the reason I do not look at men’s faces when walking. I know too well what they are looking at, and I don’t want to think about it. Objectification blows.)

The other is that I have been seeing a lot of F. Really, a lot. Night after night of platonic….uh….goodness? Is there anything better than lurid sex scenes from old Mexican B movies? NO, I say! And I say it decidedly, determined to silence my own nagging suspicion that sex is better than watching lurid sex scenes. But it has been so many months that I can’t even remember now.

I always know it’s coming, but this time it is likely to be worse, as I…sort of…humiliated him in front of all of his peers the other day. He has many, many times, when I am doing training, inserted himself to try to undermine me, simply because I am a woman. In the past I’ve tried to ignore it, as I didn’t feel comfortable ripping his head off. Well, Tuesday, I did rip his head off, and it was planned. I knew he would be an ass, and I had my response all ready to go. He was so stunned he asked me to repeat myself, which I did.

Sigh. I don’t really like parts of who I have become in this job. Namely, the scared anxious me who wishes she could avoid seeing these people at any cost. But there is that more bold me that has come out, and in the long run, I told this guy something he should have heard long ago, right before he was fired.