Crying that makes me cry

I wrote a couple days ago about how Michelle Pfeiffer's performance at the end of The Story of Us kills me. I didn't mention that it is also funny. 

Spoilers for Story of Us, I guess, plus necessarily some further spoilers about other movies, but mostly things you probably already know. 

In a tear-strewn, rambling monologue that lasts the better part of two minutes, Pfeiffer's Katie has a sudden realization of what it would mean to give up her husband Ben (Bruce Willis), in the parking lot of the camp where they have just picked up their kids. At first you can't tell if he is unmoved by her display, but if he doesn't appear to be, it's only because Ben had already been through the emotional ringer himself, and at this point is trying to stick to his own dispassionate resolve.

And what a display. We don't get a lot of scenes in movies where a character is crying as fast as she is talking, which is what Pfeiffer does as she goes through a stream-of-consciousness listing of things she loves about Ben, then undercutting them with inadvertent jabs, then explaining that she didn't mean the jabs, then questioning the semantic logic of something she's just said, before returning to the original stream of praise and love that is highlighted by specific examples and anecdotes from their personal history. That Pfeiffer could do this scene in essentially an unbroken take -- there are a few cutaways to Ben just to see what impact it is having on him, though I'm willing to bet her audio was uninterrupted -- then not only is she a great dramatic actress, able to produce tears and memorize lines that she regurgitates basically without taking a breath, but she is also an incredibly nimble comic one, which this movie has also already shown us in spades.

Whew. I think maybe I need to take my own breath.

The point is, even as this scene is funny, I'm crying throughout it like a total jerk, because it is so sweet and so vulnerable and the examples of the things she gives that she would miss if they were divorced are just so fricking on point. (I always think, when trying to be a better dad, how she praises Ben for always doing the voice of a storybook character in a book he reads their kids, even when he's bone tired.) In fact, there's one particular moment after she's been spinning out in reversals and other general babbling, where she starts forward again like she's shifted into a new gear of her crying, and that really gets me the most. 

So that alone made me want to write a post called "Crying that makes me cry."

It may be an obvious observation that a really good actor can set off a good contagious crying jag if we have become invested in the character they've created. However, I'm not even sure that the majority of times we cry in movies is because an actor is crying. In fact, sometimes this makes us cringe. 

In fact, it's rare enough that I am going to try to list my very best memories of this in my own viewing career, which as I'm writing this, I do not expect to exceed ten. (And yes, I've cried more than ten times at the movies.)

With Pfeiffer's feat taking #1 for the purposes of this list -- which I am not ranking from best to worst, but just in the order I think of them -- let's look at the others that came to mind:

2) Toni Colette in The Sixth Sense. I know I've talked about this before, but Colette's reaction to her son telling her that her mother was always watching her performances from the back of the theater? Which is mixed with the realization that her son must be telling the truth and is actually seeing ghosts? Simply lacerating. Perhaps one of my best ugly cries ever, though it's interesting, it did not happen for me the first time I saw the movie, only subsequent times. (What is it with Bruce Willis in movies that make me cry? Who would have thought?)

3) Liam Neeson in Schindler's List. I have a little "comedy" bit I do where I joke about not having done something -- usually something minor, because to joke about something major would not work -- and I use the dialogue of Oskar Schindler: "But I didn't." This, as you will remember, is Schindler's self-recrimination for not doing more, even more than the many things he had already done, to save as many Jews from the concentration camps as he could. And though I'm sort of mocking the performance with this joke, there's no doubt that him breaking down into tears absolutely tore me asunder when I first saw it. 

4) Tovah Feldshuh in Kissing Jessica Stein. Unlike the last two, this is a moment most of you will not know about at all. I'll set the stage. Feldshuh plays the title character's mother, who is having a heart-to-heart with her daughter about why her daughter is currently miserable. The text of her mother's perspective is that Jessica always expects too much from other people, though this is said in a gentle, loving way. Near the end, she finally reveals the subtext, which is that she knows Jessica has been seeing a woman, even though Jessica hasn't copped to it. Feldshuh says "I think--" and then her voice catches in her throat, just for a second, as she chokes back a tear we didn't even see there. "I think she seems like a very nice girl." Jennifer Westfeldt's Jessica has been crying throughout this scene, but that little hitch gets me more than anything Westfeldt is doing, because it's also the reveal that she loves and supports Jessica, even if she might be a lesbian, and Jessica should never have thought otherwise. The accepting of gay kids by their parents always gets me.

5) Isabella Kai and Violet McGraw in Our Friend. There is something about how Casey Affleck says "Your mom is going to die" -- straightforward but with almost a mechanical loss of his ability to get the words out normally -- to his kids in this movie that starts me on the path. But I think the real waterworks begin when I see how these two kids, who should not be able to do this convincingly at such a young age, react to the news that their mother's cancer is terminal. (This isn't the exact photo, since the only version of the exact scene I could find had watermarks on it.) But in that moment, I feel what it is to realize the enormity and finality of death among children who are too young to properly process it, especially when it is the woman who has cared for you all your lives, but soon will no longer be able to do that, or even be around.  

6) Brendan Fraser in The Whale. I know I'm supposed to feel some sort of shame that this was my #1 movie of 2022 and by now I'm supposed to realize the ways I was wrong to love it, but I'm sorry, I haven't gotten there yet. I broke down a couple times during this movie, and though it was actually a moment that didn't involve crying from Samantha Morton that hit me hardest, I can't deny that Fraser's deep emotional breakdowns in this film got me going again. The sort of big, defiant crying-arguing that he does here is actually so desperate, in the way that it utterly scrapes him out from the inside, that it just wrecked me. I'll leave the discussions of the movie's alleged fatphobia to others.

7) Ricky Schroeder in The Champ. This is a movie I really need to rewatch because it would be more than 40 years since I saw it, and possibly closer to 45. I remember this movie being watched at the house I grew up in, so long ago that the TV was in what was my dad's office for at least the last 20 years he lived there. I think my mom put it on. And when (spoiler alert) the boxer dies at the end of the movie, his son's tears are so real that it confronted me with a sensation I'd never had in a movie before, not to mention the idea of how I would feel if one of my parents died. Did I actually cry? Do I remember it because my mother was crying and I thought that was weird? Not sure, but it had a powerful enough impact that I remember Schroeder's acting all these years later. 

8) Kaitlyn Dias in Inside Out. You don't even have to be able to see the actor's face for realistic crying to work. Dias' vocal performance at the end of Inside Out is phenomenal, and it just so happens that she has brilliant animators to help translate it to us completely. There's no doubt that seeing Riley's face slouch into the tears of missing Minnesota is key to our reaction to this scene, but it's the little crying sounds made by Dias, before she even starts getting her words out, that really start us on our path to the inevitable. Then her words just get us there at hyperspeed. 

9) Marceline Rofit in Tanna. When I started watching a movie about a star-crossed romance between indigenous peoples of Vanuatu, I anticipated experiencing the distance of being a westerner who might not otherwise relate to them perfectly well. Fortunately, great filmmaking bridges that empathy gap, and rarely do I remember it better bridged than in watching my #2 of 2016. Rofit plays a child who ends up having an unfortunate role in this star-crossed romance, and at one point we see her weeping while in hiding, ashamed of what she has brought about and overwhelmed with grief. I say "overwhelmed" not because Rofit overplays the scene, and for a non-professional actress, it's rather amazing that she does not (a credit to co-directors Martin Butler and Bentley Dean). Her snuffling technique, otherwise wordless, hit me hard. (Again this is not exactly the right image, but the right image had the aforementioned watermark.)

10) Adele Haenel in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I am having trouble remembering when exactly the waterworks came in my #2 of 2019, whether there was an earlier episode or not until the climactic scene depicted here. But Haenel's quiet crying while watching a performance, at the remembrance of the relationship she did not quite have, is the accumulation of all the emotions that have been welling up in us over the past two hours, and it had this release effect on me. This image was actually on the banner of The Audient for a time, since it is also an audience member watching a performance, though not a movie in this case. (They hadn't been invented yet.)

That's a good place to stop I think. I got to my ten.

As I was scrolling through my top 500 movies on Flickchart, figuring that would give me a good reminder of the movies that had most gotten to me emotionally (even if not all the movies in that top ten are in my top 500), I noted a decent number of examples where I cried, but not because of someone else crying. These were moments of emotional generosity, a reconciliation, a sudden awareness of something unexpected and emotionally devastating, a farewell, things like that. So my idea that there has to be crying involved for me to cry was, thankfully, disproven.

I do feel that if an actor's primary goal is to translate what they are experiencing to the viewer, crying that makes the audience cry is one of the best indicators of success at their craft. I wrote a post on this blog, which I won't bother to link to now, about "yawn acting," and how you know an actor is good at their job if they can yawn in a movie and it makes the viewer yawn in real life. The idea being that only a genuine yawn is contagious, and so these actors are good enough to make their yawns look genuine.

I think yawning specifically may be a bad example, as yawning is suggestible enough that even as I am writing about it, I feel myself inclined to yawn. But that doesn't change my point, which is: crying is the hardest thing for an actor to do well. Some people can cry on cue, but they do it too demonstrably, making a show of it rather than giving us something emotionally relatable. Some people can't cry on cue, and a PA has to come with an eye dropper and simulate a tear sliding down the actor's face.

It's the actors who not only can cry on cue, but make the crying contagious -- who make us cry -- who are really doing God's work in bringing us the emotional fullness of the cinematic experience. And I've just discussed ten of them here. 

Queen Jeanne

Ten years ago, I was so interested in the release of Sight & Sound's new critics' poll on the greatest movies of all time, which comes out every ten years on the 2's, that I devoted three different posts to it, including the one where a friend and I both revealed our own ten votes, which you can find here. 

This time, I guess I've got more going on, as I considered not even mentioning it on my blog at all.

Then I thought, If I can't give at least a passing mention to something that occurs only once a decade, what kind of film blogger am I?

I considered updating the list linked above. I'm pretty sure 2001: A Space Odyssey, which topped the directors' poll this year, would make it on my personal list now. I've also soured a little bit on Rear Window since last time, though I need another viewing to see if my last viewing in 2015 just caught me on a bad night.

But even when you've been writing a film blog for nearly 14 years, it can be boring to write the same post twice, so I'm going to skip over that idea and instead register my shock at this year's new poll topper.

I had not even seen Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles when the last list was released. I rectified that in 2018, but only after sitting through its arduous and intentionally monotonous 201 minutes over the course of two nights. I considered myself better for having seen it but I cannot say I actually liked it in the traditional sense. In some respects it is one of the most uncinematic films I have ever seen. 

And now it has been voted by critics as only the fourth film ever to top the list.

The Bicycle Thief (still refusing the plural over here) was the first ever list-topper in 1952, before Citizen Kane launched a (justified) reign of terror that ran the next half century, until just before the 2012 list was released. Even when the list was separated into two lists in 1992, divided between critics and directors, neither group moved off of Kane until 2012, when both dropped it in favor of Vertigo (critics) and Tokyo Story (directors). 

I was incensed enough when my beloved Kane was overthrown by the overrated Vertigo, but this ... this is something else.

"Incensed" is not the right word this time. "Puzzled" is probably better.

On the one hand I applaud that Sight & Sound's attempt to diversify its voting body has yielded what would appear to be immediate results. It seems impossible not to draw a correlation between the invitation to more female critics, and the existence of more female critics in general, and the rapid ascension of a film that they obviously believe speaks to the essential experience of women. 

On the other hand, in a list designed as intentionally slow-moving, where one film was king for 50 years, should we really be seeing such a rapid ascension? Jeanne Dielman was a mere #36 in 2012, and the only event that occurred in the ten years since then to raise its profile was the suicide of its director, Chantal Akerman -- which could indeed be used as a lens to add intensity to the film's themes.

Then again this list is fundamentally an expression of passion inspired in its voters at the time of their vote, not some stodgy adherence to the status quo. One of the 2022 list's great surprises on the positive side is the #30 debut of Celine Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire, my #2 of 2019 that still makes me swoon any time I think about it. It may be that this film will never get any closer to #1, and probably that it should not, but the fact that it has this moment to commit to permanence its impact on critics is really terrific. And of course it's likely we have female critics to thank for this as well.

And it's not like they've cleared the deck of the old standard bearers. Vertigo is still #2, Citizen Kane is still #3. I hate to think of Kane as "only" the third best movie of all time, but Kane doesn't need Sight & Sound to continue delivering accolades to it. It is thoroughly and utterly chalk at this point.

I want to pause to acknowledge a slight grammatical deviation in the listing of the full title of Jeanne Dielman, now that the film is getting such attention. I'm seeing it listed primarily with an additional comma than the one I'd been using, as Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles rather than Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. (The poster above has yet a third punctuation, with only one comma after 23.) 

I'm going to keep the punctuation I've used over the years whenever I've mentioned it -- this used to be my go-to joke for a long and ungainly title, even before I saw it -- for a couple reasons. One is that having the 23 offset by commas makes it seem like it is Jeanne's age, which we know is not correct because the character has a grown son. Furthermore, its points would be considerably hollower if we were talking about a woman just five years out of high school -- the whole idea is that her life has settled into a drudgery of household chores and tricks with johns. Another reason is that Wikipedia, which I trust implicitly whether I should or not, continues to use the punctuation I've been using, though notably, IMDB uses the one I've been seeing passed around since the Sight & Sound list was revealed. It could be that IMDB scrambled to fix it up just within the last few days, I don't know.

In 2012 it seems like the top 250 vote getters were readily available to find, but this year's articles about the poll seem to focus on the top 100, so I'll make some isolated comments about those top 100 for the remainder of this piece.

#4 - Tokyo Story - This is my preferred example of how to make a slow-moving film that lulls us into a total understanding of its themes by the end. I wrote a long piece on this movie in college and I'm really due for another viewing.

#6 - 2001: A Space Odyssey - As mentioned, this topped the directors' poll and rightly so, as this film has shot up majorly in my estimation as a result of two viewings (one on the big screen in 70 mm) since the 2012 poll. This is now in my personal top 20 on Flickchart and I couldn't be happier to see all the voters continue to shower it with praise. (And yes, it makes sense that this would top the directors' poll as it is a very "directy" film, as I wrote to a friend yesterday.)

#7 - Beau Travail - Okay ladies, you need to calm down now. This is the highest ranked film I haven't seen, and it was another film directed by a woman, Claire Denis. In its way, the ascension of this film could be considered even more shocking than Jeanne Dielman, as it was only at #74 in 2012. Guess I will prioritize a viewing now.

#9 - Man With a Movie Camera - Another film I had not seen in 2012, this one truly earns its spot. I awarded this five stars on Letterboxd when I finally watched it in 2020. 

#14 - Cleo from 5 to 7 - This makes three female directors in the top 15, which really, is a good thing, whatever shock I may be registering. I had meant to watch this when I acquainted myself with the films of Agnes Varda a few years ago but for some reason couldn't find it. Second movie in the top 100 I haven't seen.

#16 - Meshes in the Afternoon - Female co-directed (Maya Deren). Third unseen.

#17 - Close Up - I had only just seen Abbas Kiarostami's film when the last list was revealed. Really deserving. 

#27 - Shoah - This movie is like nine hours long and it still breaks my notion of what a film is, so I still have not seen it. Fourth unseen.

#28 - Daisies - Another female director. Fifth unseen.

#31 - Mirror - Tarkovsky. Sixth unseen.

#43 - Killer of Sheep - Another film newly seen by me in the last decade. Wasn't quite this impressed with it but like that it's on the list.

#48 - Wanda - Directed by Barbara Loden, another woman. First film on this list whose title is not actually familiar to me at all. Seventh unseen. 

#52 - News from Home - Chantal Akerman's second film on the list. I wasn't aware of this, apparently, when I watched two movies by Akerman for my Audient Auteurs series in 2018, watching the similarly titled No Home Movie to go along with Jeanne Dielman. Eighth unseen. 

#52 - Fear Eats the Soul - I actually wanted to watch Rainer Werner Fassbinder films for the above-mentioned Audient Auteurs series, but I think there was an availability issue with his films. (Incidentally, I always heard this referred to as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, but I guess Ali has gone away.) Ninth unseen. 

#54 - Sherlock Jr. - This was a first-time viewing for me in 2016, and I really wish it were in the top ten. 

#54 - Le Mepris (Contempt) - Godard. Tenth unseen. 

#59 - Sans Soleil + #60 - Daughters of the Dust - Two more movies that I've watched for the first time since last list. I wasn't using that list as an official watchlist but it looks like I did some good work in the past ten years.

#60 - Moonlight - Second film that could not have made a previous list. 

#66 - Touki Bouki - Eleventh unseen. 

#67 - The Gleaners and I - This is what I watched when I watched Varda films for Audient Auteurs and couldn't get my hands on Cleo. Another first-time viewing in the past ten. Really good film.

#67 - Andrei Rublev - Another Tarkovsky I haven't seen, though ten years ago I hadn't seen any, and now I've seen three, so I guess that's something. Twelfth unseen. 

#72 - My Neighbor Totoro - It seems hard to believe that in 2012 I had only seen one Miyazaka film, that being Spirited Away, and now I have seen all but his first and his most recent. Did I mention I've been doing good work in the past ten years? Totoro is my favorite.

#72 - Journey to Italy - Thirteenth unseen.

#72 - L'avventura - Another first-time watch in the past ten.

#75 - Imitation of Life and Sansho the Bailiff - Two more first-time watches since the 2012 list, though I really didn't like Sansho the Bailiff. 

#78 - A Brighter Summer Day, Satanango and Celine and Julie Go Boating - Fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth unseen. 

#78 - A Matter of Life and Death - I really need to stop listing the films I've watched for the first time in the past ten years. I get it, I've been a good doobie. This is one of my favorites of those.

#84 - Pierrot le Fou, Histoire du Cinema and Spirit of the Beehive - Seventeenth through nineteenth unseen.

#88 - Chungking Express - I can't tell you how many times I've tried to find this. I can't. Twentieth unseen. 

#90 - Parasite - That's two 2019 films to debut on this list, though I would have liked to see my #1 from that year higher.

#90 - Yi Yi - I have also tried to find this without success. Twenty-first unseen.

#97 - Get Out - Final film debuting in the top 100 that did not yet exist in 2012. It's interesting to note that the debuts are from two Black male directors, one Korean male director and one French female director. That's some good diversity right there.

#95 - Black Girl and Tropical Malady. And we end with a total of 23 unseen movies.

I'll have you know that I skipped mentioning five more films that I had seen since 2012 after vowing to stop that. I also missed a few earlier (sorry Battle of Algiers, I love you) but I'm not going to go back and correct that now. 

So having seen 77% of the top 100 is pretty good, certainly a lot better than I did last time. And now I've got a good list to work from for next time, though with the way this list tends to randomly unearth movies that aren't household names for cinephiles, I don't suspect I'll have any chance of hitting the full top 100 in 2032. 

Sounds like a long time from now, but I guess 2022 sounded like a long time from 2012. I'll be 59. Perish the thought.

I should probably give an additional shout out to the directors' list, which, as in 2012, seems like more a reflection of the films they actually like than the films they think they should like. In my 2012 post linked above, I said that the critics seemed to try to out-impress each other while the directors were more likely to geek out on a perceived peer that they admired, tending for (slightly) more mainstream fare. Many of the titles are of course the same, but a handful I'll shout out that I'm happy to see are Taste of Cherry, The Conformist, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Wild Strawberries, A Separation, The Seventh Seal, Jaws, Eraserhead, Don't Look Now and Dr. Strangelove. They only had room for two of the first-time eligible movies, Parasite and Moonlight. Minus points for including Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom on their list -- also an unfortunate first-time viewing in the past decade. Blecch. 

I guess once I got writing about Sight & Sound I had a fair amount to say after all.

See you back here in ten years.

Quarantine Battles: 2019 rematch

Did I need to watch Parasite for a third time within the first year that I'd seen it? That anyone had seen it, since the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, at which it debuted and claimed top prize, didn't start until last May 14th, with Parasite's first showing coming a week after that?

Probably not. But it sure was fun.

Even though Parasite is no longer "my movie" -- an honor I could claim for a while, as I was the first person I knew who had seen it, back at the end of last June, three months before it debuted in the U.S. -- it's still my #1 of last year, and will always, therefore, by one of "my" movies. In that year's time, Parasite has taken the world by storm, most recently (but probably least consequentially) capping off its award win streak by taking home top honors in the 64-movie Filmspotting Madness best of the 2010s tournament, where it beat Mad Max: Fury Road as the best of the decade according to the podcast's listeners.

Even with all that, though, recently I haven't been sure if it was even my best of last year. Which makes a good segue into the three reasons I watched Parasite with my wife on Sunday night:

1) It was for free on our Australian streaming service Stan, which was too much to resist;

2) My second viewing was on a plane, and I had to miss the last ten minutes due to the fact that we were disembarking; and

3) I thought it was time to decide whether or not it was actually better than Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

And so, welcome to my first (and possibly last) installment in Quarantine Battles, where I watch two movies in close succession that have an equal claim to some particular honor, to see which one comes out on top.

Parasite may have bested Mad Max: Fury Road in the Filmspotting tournament, but in my own personal rankings for 2019, it bested Portrait of a Lady on Fire. My #2 was in a tricky position, though, having been seen by me only two weeks before I closed my list. If it hadn't had such stiff competition on the top, it might have been my #1 -- and might have deserved to scale the heights even with such a formidable opponent.

I actually intended to watch Parasite the previous Sunday, as it would have given me back-to-back viewings on consecutive nights, creating the type of proximity that would have made the movies' merits, both independently and in relation to each other, abundantly clear. That was more or less how I handled the final showdown of my own best of the decade, watching Tangled and Spring Breakers as a double feature on the second-to-last night of last year. But my wife, noticing that I was about to start watching, asked me not to leave her out of the Parasite viewing, which would be her second. I agreed to postpone to her proposed alternative time the following Sunday night.

Whether separated by one night or eight, I think I would have reached the same conclusion, which is:

It's still Parasite.

The last time I watched a movie three times within the first year I'd seen it -- the third time also with my wife -- it was Creed in 2015/2016. In that case I saw it twice a week apart in the theater, my affection still holding strong after the second viewing -- strong enough that it came in only behind Inside Out as my favorite of the year. The third viewing, though, knocked it down a peg. It was once too many in such a short amount of time.

I worried the same might be true of Parasite, even with the compromised second plane viewing. The fact that it wasn't, and that I watched it in a state of perpetual thrills at the wonder of Bong's filmmaking, left little doubt that it was still just a hair better than Portrait.

You should have no doubt that Portrait was still worthy of that #2 spot. I loved watching it again and I think I may have actually cried in one additional spot than I did the first time. C'est magnifique.

I've seen all three of my top three of 2019 in the past month, in fact, with #3 Vivairum in there as well. All still maintain their relative rankings, which I guess is an unsurprising outcome given that it's only been three-and-a-half months since I placed them in their respective spots.

But Parasite ... well, there's the reason it's the most agreed upon best film of the year in as long as I can remember.

I guess I should think of my next possible Quarantine Battle, as it's not cool to introduce a possible recurring feature and then never do it again.

But we got a number of new high-profile cases of coronavirus just in the past few days in Victoria -- some from a school, some from a meat-packing plant -- so something tells me I don't need to hurry.

The impossibility of playing it cool

Two college friends of mine, who did not know each other very well, helped me out with a task back at school, and ended up riding back to campus together in the same car. (I don't remember where I was, but I was not with them.)

On that ride, the driver played the passenger a band he really liked, but whom the passenger had not heard. As the passenger tells it, while the first song was playing, the driver continually turned his head to the right to try to catch that ineffable moment when the passenger fell in love with the song/band. He checked in on the passenger an unnatural number of times, or at least enough that the passenger thought it was funny enough to mention to me.

Whether or not he actually gauged the other's reaction in words, a private joke between the passenger and me grew out of it, which is basically that the driver said "Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it?" When performing the joke, you say it quickly, like "Ja like it ja like it ja like it?"

It has lingered as a joke not because the driver's behavior was so unusual. In fact, it's probably because it identified a very real phenomenon:

It's so hard to be cool when trying to share something you love.

Since I am rarely introducing bands to people -- my current School of Rock lessons to my kids notwithstanding (see full discussion here) -- the corollary in my own life is movies. As a cinephile, it's understood that you are always recommending movies to people. It's what we do.

The more enlightened of us make the recommendation and leave it at that.

The more masochistic? We watch the film with them.

Using the "ja like it" story as a cautionary tale, I have learned over the years to try not to place so much pressure on a joint viewing, which is usually undertaken with my wife, as she is my most regular movie-watching companion. In fact, I clearly recall a few scenarios where I had her watch a recommendation without me present in the room, even though I was present in the house. My #3 movie of last decade, John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole, was one such example. And a good one, as my wife ended up loving the movie just as much as I did -- perhaps in part due to the fact that I was not there hovering over her and gauging her reaction.

More often than not, though, the occasion for me showing a movie to my wife is that I am dying to see it a second (or third, or fourth) time, and I don't want to waste the opportunity by leaving her out of the viewing. Such was the case with our Saturday night viewing of Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

If it is not clear that I love this film, well, it should be. Even though I saw it for the first time only two weeks before finalizing that best of the decade list referenced above, Portrait made it on to the list. Because of the ridiculously short turnaround, I installed it at #25, the last ranked spot before the honorable mentions, though it was clear to me that it should have been higher. I guess I thought #25 was a good compromise between its actual quality and the deleterious effects of recency bias. It may have been similar thinking that caused me to place it at #2 for 2019, behind only Parasite. Given another couple weeks to sit with it, I might have vaulted it over Parasite as well.

If you're looking for further evidence of my love -- as if telling you were not enough -- just look at my new banner at the top of this page, which I put up a couple weeks ago. If you haven't seen the movie, you might not recognize it, but this is indeed a shot from Portrait, with Adele Haenel as Heloise being an "audient." That scene is one of the best of last year -- of the last five years maybe.

Okay so you get it. I like this movie.

But ... I'm old enough and wise enough to show restraint during a viewing. I don't constantly turn my head to see how my wife is liking it. I've matured, as I'm sure my 22-year-old friend introducing that band to my other 22-year-old friend has also matured.

That said, my behavior still forced my wife to quip "Stop monitoring me!" at one point during the movie.

I'll explain.

When I rented Portrait of a Lady on Fire from iTunes, I knew my intention was to show it to my wife. But I err on the side of caution when putting forward movies for her consideration these days. Especially during quarantine, when we spend the week effectively home-schooling our kids in addition to working, everyone needs their free time to unwind. There's no better way to spoil a potential viewing than to make it seem like an obligation.

But I looked up on Friday and noticed that my rental window was down to just 13 days. It was time to at least mention it, so my wife had nearly two full weeks to put it on our schedule. As it turned out, she was pretty excited to see it, so she programmed it for the very next night. Okay, initial hurdle cleared.

But there was a second hurdle -- and third, and fourth -- still awaiting us. Because my kids had a Netflix movie party with their aunt, which didn't end until about 8:40, we got a late start on everything. Plus, we were all tired from having gotten out and exercised for a couple hours during the day. Plus, my wife found out at about 8 that her friend's son had broken his arm and was in "hospital" (you drop the definite article in Australia).

I should have probably called an audible on the viewing. I didn't.

So when we started the 122-minute movie at just after 9, my wife was not in her best shape to consume it. I shouldn't have been either, as I was already on my second glass of wine, but see many previous discussions of how being engaged in something you love keeps you plenty awake.

My wife did not yet love it, so she did not yet have the advantage I did. And the way it was going, she never would.

So yes, I was monitoring her -- not to make sure she loved the movie, but to make sure she was paying enough attention to it and not falling asleep. Which was, of course, for the purpose of giving  her the chance to love the movie, so maybe it amounts to the same thing.

Like a good friend should, she continued to participate in a message thread about the kid who'd had the bike accident. I get it. And it's possible this did not prevent her from missing anything, as she speaks French so did not need to read all the subtitles.

But I just couldn't prevent myself from looking over, from silently judging her failure to watch the movie. She finds it no end of a distraction if I am on a device during a joint viewing, and I felt it was my right to feel the same thing, even with her mitigating circumstances.

I think the problem is that I was not always silently judging. At one point I asked, "Are you following all this?" I think it was my way of confirming that she wasn't rusty enough on her French to catch all the dialogue, but as you might guess, it came out wrong.

Once she was conscious of the attention I was paying to how she was watching the movie, it became its own thing, even when that's not what I was doing. For example, once I looked over to gauge how much wine she had left in her glass, which would tell me how much of the remaining bottle I could pour in mine. I think that's actually when the "Stop monitoring me!" comment came. (Oh yeah, and having wine was probably the thing that pushed the three other hurdles -- the late start, the exhaustion, the broken arm -- over the edge into full impracticality.)

In the end, she never fell asleep (that she would admit to), though she did say "I've been struggling to stay awake for the past two hours," which means the entirety of the movie, and which is no way to watch any movie, let alone something subtle and sophisticated. She did say that she thought it was "really good," though as you can probably imagine, that was not the reaction I was really looking for. She also didn't want to discuss any details of the movie, even when I was going to tell her a simple thing like the fact that Haenel was also in Deerskin, the Quentin Dupieux movie we watched together last year at MIFF.

See, that's the problem with people who love things, and who lose their ability to play it cool when it comes to them. We aren't happy with something being "really good" and with a person not falling asleep while watching it. We want it to redefine this other person's existence, and it's just never likely to do that -- even with a movie as universally beloved as Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

My wife has a more "live and let live" approach to these things -- a more cool approach, to use the parlance of my current argument. Whether I like something she shows me or not, so what? It doesn't affect her love for that thing. I mean, she's not so enlightened that she doesn't recognize when it was a bad time to do a particular thing we were both invested in, and have her regrets about it. But when that thing is in progress, she's not likely to "monitor" me for my reaction.

What can I say? When it comes to my love of movies, I am not cool. 

Portraits of little women on fire

I've seen both Portrait of a Lady Fire and Little Women in the past week, the latter just last night, and I couldn't help but notice some funny similarities.

Some of them are just based on the period of time in which they occur, which is separated by eight decades or so, but still reflects some of the same overriding principles for gender roles in society.

Some of them, though, are just weird.

In reverse order of their weirdness:

1) Both films feature women being encouraged to marry for the purposes of their own upward mobility, and rebelling against that.

2) Both films feature a woman who is working as, or aspires to be, a painter.

Those ones are not that weird. But:

3) Both films feature a woman whose dress catches on fire. It happens to Heloise in Portrait and it happens to Jo in Women. That's not something I've seen in a movie in, I don't know, a long time, and I saw it twice in the same week. And in both instances, the woman whose dress is on fire does not at first notice it, having to be alerted to the fact by other characters.

And the weirdest one:

4) When I was watching Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I observed that the actress Noemie Merlant bears a striking resemblance to Emma Watson -- who is in Little Women. If only Watson also played the painter in Women, it would be even weirder, but alas, that role goes to Florence Pugh.

Hey, just because it's a new decade doesn't mean I don't still love pointing out coincidences.

Do both acclaimed films also appear in my top ten for the year?

You'll have to wait another week to find out.