L'Auberge espagnole (2002)

To live is to move, which is to learn.

Cécile de France treads lightly, beautifully.

The creators have failed to resist the temptation to adorn the film with a Brit, as if freshly out of Ricky Gervais's "The Office." The British society's division in clusters, as is evident from its numerous accents, renders such jokes less damning for the Brits than analogous caricatures of American characters are for Americans. A British culprit is a bearer of a particular accent, and it is assumed that his vices do not easily spread to the classes that sport alternative accents and speak in complete sentences.

The film subtly exhibits curious French camaraderie, which makes being French appear akin to belonging to the network of the Harvard Business School graduates. Friends or foes, the members are kin. One would like to imagine that the club is merit-based, not nationality-based.

My Man Godfrey (1936)

Trying times for men are the times of opportunity for the nation. If adversities do not destroy the nation, they invite the stubborn, the ambitious, the clever, and the lucky to replace the spent elite, as the stubborn, the ambitious, the clever, and the lucky struggle for their survival.

In order to hedge the downside risk of this Capraesque but Capraless cinematic enterprise, the film ends with an unlikely marriage between two protagonists.

Entre les murs (2008)

One can work at improving the world in different occupations, at various locations. Few of these can be resolutely deemed more deserving one's effort than others. Instead, one should aspire to address the world's problems in a way that is mastered by fewest others, but without the presumption that this chosen way is the noblest one.

This film is not the Cinema. It is a sombre tribute to chaos, which eventually gives rise to---or at least co-exists with---civilization.

"Marry Me" by John Updike (1977)

If Nature abhors a vacuum, religious thought fills it. Religion cannot be blamed for deficiencies in one's character though. It is one's character that chooses to accept religion in the first place. So, the book is not about the paralysing effect of religion.

The characters are casualties of the suburban life style of the mid-twentieth century, in which a house-wife lacking a day job fulfils her ambitions by pursuing a day lover. The day lover, having outsourced his reason to the absentee God and a partial spouse, mistrusts and misjudges his feelings, and hence, is unable to make decisions. He seeks inevitability by taking a seat amid the audience, only occasionally interrupting the Life's performance by shouting at characters, in full confidence that they do not---should not---hear and would not---must not---heed his remarks.

There is certain mutual disrespect in the characters' habit of enunciating aloud to each other their emotionally charged thoughts. The creativity of individuality is lost in such a chatter. Respect is lost too; whereas if love survives, it loses its object by blurring the boundaries between oneself, the other, and the others. "In their willingness to live in parallel lay their weakness and their strength." The honesty of the characters' conversations stems not from trust or strength, but from the desire to renounce all responsibility for what happens---to the other and to oneself---by arming the other with all information.

Jerry is attracted to Sally because, living apart, they are not given to the continuous utilitarian chatter. Hence, Jerry perceives Sally as a distinct object of his desire---distinct from himself and his family. Sally seems much more real than his wife because, not being his suburban wife, she does not shadow his every step and thought; she is unpredictable and therefore alive.

The theme of death is the theme of indecisiveness. Jerry feels dying. Immersed in the routine of producing children and steady income, he is stripped of any need to make decisions. His wife, Ruth, accepts Jerry's indecisiveness, thereby becoming an accomplice in his dying. He despises her for that. Sally is the only domain of his life that contains ambiguity, room for deciding. But she would not have him dead, the state to which she feels that he would revert, once settled into the routine of being with her.

"The world is composed of what we think it is; what we expect tends to happen; and what we expect is really what we desire."

The prose is succinct, the sentences are short, the observations are precise, and no points are belaboured.

An advantage of seeing the story related on the pages of a paperback, as opposed to being projected onto a screen, is that the reader can invest the characters with more subtlety than would have been disbursed to them by a film director, who would invariably seek the sensationalism of the grotesque. One can also imagine the protagonists as youthful spirits, not infantile ones. The latter, perhaps, is a more truthful representation.