Connecting.

I just watched the movie Elegy starring Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley. It’s about the unconventional but intense love affair between a beautiful young woman and a much older man. Mel lent it to me. She thought I would connect with it; she thought I would like it.

I did connect with it in several ways, though not all. And yet, although I’m no stranger to slow moving, psychology-based stories, I didn’t actually like it. I found it claustrophobic.

And so I’ve spent the last half hour wondering why I found it claustrophobic. Was it the direction, the screenplay, the lighting, the locations? I still don’t know, but I suspect it might have been a ‘there but for the grace of God…’ thing.

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Must find Sibelius’s The Swan of Tuonela on YouTube later. I mentioned it in an email earlier as one of my favourite pieces of classical music. I haven’t heard it in years. It refers to the swan which glides silently over the dark waters which encompass the Isle of the Dead in Finnish mythology. Does that sound more like my kind of thing?