Two Films

Watched Let The Right One In on the weekend. It's rather great. The kids are WONDERFUL. When the boy grins goofily, it's the most delightful thing to behold. And you just want them to be together, regardless of the mounting body count. So I was happy for them in the end. But then, as the credits rolled, a horrible thought occurred to me. And it was this: "When did she meet that old guy? How old was he when they met?" And I began to be overwhelmed by a crushing sadness at the thought that fifty years prior he might too have been a sweet and gentle kid with an open heart. And he might have spent fifty years devoted to keeping her safe and fed. And all the horrors that entailed. And I remembered that look he gave her in the taxi at the beginning of the film when they first arrived at their new flat - so loving. Devotion is the word. From that angle, the rest of the film - which I had been thinking of as a sweet flowering of friendship and gentleness and acceptance - came to seem like a drawn out act of cruelty.

Directly after Let The Right One In, we watched You, The Living. It was marvellous strange. And it won me over very early, in that first scene where that belligerently sad woman on a bench is all, "Go away, no one understands me," to her long-suffering partner. And he's all, "Don't be like that. There's a lovely roast in the oven. Life's not so bad. And we had a lovely picnic yesterday, didn't we? You liked it." Her response to this was priceless: 'Sure... YESTERDAY!" It was hilarioose.