Long Ago in Bristol and Verona ...

It's been a tough day for getting my head around the concept of aging gracefully. The exercises the chipper young physical therapist gave me to do between appointments are leaving me gasping in horror at just how much recovery is going to be necessary before I am "good as new." New in which decade, I wonder. This afternoon I limped gamely out the front door and down my six zillion front steps to confer with my yard guy about the trees that need to be pruned before they start to bud again in the spring. While I was out there I continued my hobble all the way down the driveway to the post box to see what fresh hell might be lurking therein. Much to my delight, however, a DVD I had ordered from some dodgy 'art house' distributor had arrived. I stumbled on to this particular bit of film history at the end of an internet trawl through 18th century choral music, down a side track to Beatles and Rolling Stones tunes of the late 1960's and then a sharp left turn to a film I've often thought about over the years but haven't actually seen since 1964. One is able to get a DVD with this cinematic offering from a strange little place in New York, so I ordered it. What can I say; it was late, I was tired. I can still remember most of the words from the theme song of the movie (although I am completely incapable of remembering code citations for most crimes). I was curious to watch not only the movie, but my reaction to the movie all these many (many ... many) years later. I can still recall the theater in Walnut Creek where my sister and I saw the movie originally. I recall thinking that the characters were so glamorous and foreign when I saw it (never having been out of California at that time). After watching the film and watching myself, I popped Franco Zeffirelli's 'Romeo & Juliet' (c.1968) into the DVD player and tried to remember watching that for the first time, too. The story is not only chock full of all the nonsensical and dangerous ideas of "true love", but the first time I saw it I was the same age as both of the lead characters and the young actors who portrayed them. 

It's so curious to try to remember what something was like for the first time when you revisit it with vision obscured by decades of life experience. All of the characters in both films looked so very young and vulnerable (well, shoot, they're half the age of my child now!). Cheeks are so soft and pliant; hair so glorious and thick; young lips still so full and bodies still so lissome. And how do I see these characters today? So serious in their desperate concerns about love and life. I have to curb my impulse to lock them safely in their rooms until they grow some sense. But that's not what life and living are about, is it? Romeo and Juliet continue to kill themselves. The kids in "Some People" go on, after the film ends, to the difficult life of post-war England. And I go on with my life. We all married, for better or worse, some of us repeatedly, and for the most part none of us killed ourselves or each other. That was what life and living were about. 

Romeo & Juliet today

When I have enough energy I'll pop in "A Man For All Seasons" and "Becket" and see if I can relive the awe with which I first saw those films (both in San Francisco). I'll try to recall how I remembered the films and those amazing lives when I later read several biographies involving both men. And I'll look at the contemporary photographs of the actors who played all these characters and find some peace with the girl/woman who looks back at me from the mirror and age gracefully.

"Things die, too, you know. And so, if they too have to die, well there it is, it's so much better to let them go. That has much more style about it, apart from everything else, don't you agree?" (Giorgio Bassani; The Garden of the Finzi-Continis)