It's All About the Film

Today is a cinematic day, and it has been filled with hard lessons. I left my day kind of fluid and unstructured so I could help the J if she needed it. She told us at breakfast that she wasn't going to shoot during the day because she wanted it to be dark outside for all the indoor shots, and she needed access to the neighbors' Porsche for the outdoor shots. They weren't home today so she was planning to do the outdoor shots tomorrow. I asked her to please go through her shot list and her plan for filming to make sure she had everything she needed and to maybe do some test filming during the day to avoid last minute snafus as much as possible. She got rather exasperated with me and defensive when I pushed her for details. I tried and failed, to convey to her (with my decades of hard-won experience) that she needed to not leave everything till the last minute thinking it would work out and she had everything covered. So I too my friend Mike's advice, I stepped back, I breathed through the impulse to push (more) and I left the room.

I spent my day cleaning and unpacking in the studio. We have owned this house for 25 months, I have lived here for 16 months, and I am still not even close to unpacked! There is still a substantial number of things I have been looking for and can't find. A friend told me once that I would never make it as a military wife as you have to be able to unpack and get settled quickly. I'd still be putzing around unpacking when it was time to pack up and move again. Of course if I were a military wife I wouldn't have so much STUFF. Tomorrow I plan to keep working out there and, though I don't have a specific stopping point goal in mind, I hope to get a LOT done. I also have to stay out of the J's way. Her father has that one down: Every time I start to talk to her about her film or her homework, he "leaves us to it" and goes into the bedroom. Right now we're both hiding out in there while she does a bit more filming tonight.

At Jessie's suggestion, Dave and I went on a date night tonight so she could film in peace and privacy. She said she doesn't even like us in the next room when she's practicing piano or having a lesson so she really didn't want us around while she was filming. The plan was a movie, then dinner, then pick Zaga up at the airport at 10:00. As with Jessie's plans, ours went a little wonky too. I picked the movie: The Square, a Swedish film, this yea'r winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes. I didn't pick it because it was an artsy fartsy foreign film, I picked it because of the trailer. I didn't realize it would be in Swedish (as it didn't really sink in when I watched the trailer that it was a Swedish film and artsy fartsy. I also didn't realize it was two hours and 20 minutes long which completely screwed up our plans for dinner and getting Zaga from the airport--we managed neither. Luckily there were Twizzlers and Uber (one for us and one for her).

But about the movie... I LOVED it. It was beautifully shot, witty, articulate, funny, poignant, and completely non-Hollywood. The characters were oddly real and believable--oddly because they were, well, odd. I hadn't realized how many of the movies I look forward to seeing at the cinema are from Marvel or wish they were. Had it come from Hollywood, this film would have been pared down to under two hours. Maybe an hour and a half. But it was better for the slow, thoughtful pace. It didn't feel pretentious or full of itself in any way, and the lead actor gave one of the most amazing performances I have seen in a long time. It doesn't hurt that he is also 6'4" and handsome à la Pierce Brosnan in the Thomas Crowne Affair. As is often the case with life and European art films, the end wasn't so much an ending as a stopping point, but that's a statement too, isn't it?

I'm not going to write any more about Jessie's film and filming process tonight because it's still a journey. I don't know if it will ever be a destination, but she will get through the journey and I hope there will be lessons learned and wisdom acquired. That's all I can ask for as a parent.