Evanston: CHERI
Evanston: CHERI
7:30 a.m. Carol and dove are sleeping in.
Carol because it is Saturday. The dove because she had a hard night of thunderstorms and rain. Her usually water-sealed feathers are a bit sodden this morning.
----------
Colette is one of those names I know, but whose work I have never read.
We’ve watched some good movies this past week: FINDING NEVERLAND, which blurs the line between imagination and reality; CRAZY HEART, the enjoyable but rather slight film for which Jeff Bridges won the best actor Academy Award in a role in which he, Nick Nolte, and Kris Kristofferson could have held a lookalike contest; and. most exceeding expectation, CHERI, based as I have subsequently learned on the novel of the same name by Colette and its sequel, THE LAST OF CHERI.
Michelle Pfeiffer permits her impossibly beautiful face to age for her role as a courtesan in 1900s Paris, who at career’s end has a prolonged love affair with the son of one of her peers. She is aware that her beauty is eroding; and in time the young man reluctantly marries a girl of his own age. He survives serving in the French army in WWI. The denouement comes in a few sentences at film’s end.
All this is very well done, and along the way there are many witty lines that I suspect come directly from Colette, so I just ordered a copy of the books--there is an edition with both under one cover--to see.
In doing so I came across this comment: “Trying to live off memories, trying to revive the past and failing, these are things we humans do from time to time. For some, it consumes us.”
A few months ago I saw on television a college basketball coach tell his team at half time: “Young people live in the future. Old people live in the past. You have to live in the present and win now.”
Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in CHERI is not old, only old for her profession; and while I am getting old, in this I am not. I don’t live in the past. I savor the present. And I think that, “So what have you done lately? and “What are you going to do next?” are still valid questions.
----------
The photo was taken out the window beside me as it was raining last sunset.
Saturday, July 24, 2010