Weblog 160
March 1, 2009~ 1:45am
I finally sat down to watch "The Painted Veil"-- a 2006 movie based upon a W. Somerset Maugham novel-- and yes, the ending made me cry. Crying is a good thing when it comes from that place deep inside that's capable of feeling wounded by the varieties of beauty and pain found in the human condition-- and especially when it comes from that rare expanse where two people -so very different- forge a relationship despite impossible odds, and fall completely and devotedly in love.
I spoke about Ralph Fiennes eyes a while back and I now realize his female counterpart- with eyes every bit as luminous and heart-breakingly expressive, is Naomi Watts.
Naomi Watts has a haunting look that's difficult to stray from whenever the camera is on her; it's her magnificient ability to be completely and vulnerably open in front of the lens that permits an audience total entry into her. Edward Norton plays her bookish, preoccupied physician/husband, a bacteriologist more comfortable around microscopes than people, who is nonetheless smitten with Watts- a fairly vapid though gorgeous twenties society London ingenue whose mother is anxious to see her respectably 'married off'.
The setting is the mid 1920's in both London and China-- where a devastating cholera epidemic has broken out. Norton and Watts marry impulsively and are quickly bored with one another. Horribly mismatched as well as shallow in their decision to wed, it seems the recipe for disaster.
Naomi very quickly finds solace by bedding the husband of another society matron and when Norton finds out, he threatens her with divorce and disgrace unless she accompany him to the interior of China where he will be able to study the growing infectious outbreak. Since Watts' married paramour refuses to divorce his wife, she has no other choice but to travel along-- so a despairing Watts accompanies her estranged husband on his trek into the most primitive conditions imaginable: she simply has nothing left.
The scenery filmed in China is breathtaking --like something from a dream-- and as I sat on the floor cushions with my cat curled beside me, I glanced repeatedly at a large photograph I'd hung above the television of fog-tipped Chinese mountains that look for all the world like moss-covered great gumdrops stretching on forever. (That picture was at one time displayed at a local library, and I'd coveted it. My sweetie got it for me by asking the librarian if he could have it when they were through displaying the poster)-- and tonight there I sat.... watching a movie filmed on location in just such a place. A dreamscape- certainly.
The adversity... the isolation... the loneliness and regret... as well as a growing respect for her husband's dedication, allow Watts to see him in a different light. With both husband and wife caring more and more about the Chinese peasants in danger of contracting cholera- as well as tending them when they do- each begins to transform, and with that transformation so does the relationship between them. Norton finds a reawakening warmth toward his young wife as he watches her interact with the orphaned children...
and they fall finally --desperately-- happily in love.
Norton comes to understand that he'd married Watts for her beauty and Naomi realizes she was looking for an escape from an over-bearing mother by exerting an "I'll show her" attitude-- and both realize these were thin reasons indeed to wed. But seeing each other strive through the harshest conditions- he with his work in the clinic, she by working with the orphans of the village in a spare facility run by nuns
they begin view one another in entirely new ways as their loneliness, weariness - their mutual fears and isolation - draw them closer than anything else could.
Does it have a happy ending? Well, no....and yes. If you are tender-hearted you will definitely cry. But if you've grown along with the characters through their many ordeals, you will feel at the end that all pain has its purpose in life, and that we're tested in ways that- if not broken by them, will surely find us walking taller and straighter- and ultimately more fulfilled.
I wondered at the title, so looked it up. It's from a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
"Lift not the painted veil which
Those who live call Life...
I knew one who had lifted it—he sought,
For his lost heart as tender, things to love,
but found them not"
That left me ruminating on the phrase "be careful what you wish for"...
but I believe it's only through dreaming-- and through the inevitable disappointments we endure in the course of our lifetimes, and by disturbing the 'status-quo' that we humans grow and thrive.
And I love the subtitle for the movie: Sometimes the farthest distance to travel is the one between two people.
This is a great heart-throb of a film.....and I loved it completely.
March 1, 2009~ 8:15am
Women artists. Before we visited my daughter tonight, Wayne was showing me a link from an old issue of The New York Times, to a female artist I'd never heard of....her name is Marlene Dumas, and her work is powerful and disturbing. If you have some time, read this fascinating article about a very independent and thoroughly compelling painter, whose work fetches in the millions.
Women are good at spilling secrets through art. I tried my own hand on the computer with a little piece doodled in Windows 'Paint'- called
"Broken Memories Of Carla"
Not Dumas, by any stretch....lol...still, art is a medium whereby we can enter states of consciousness that are more intuitive than waking life. More intuitive....often more candid. Try it. Don't be afraid of being amateurish. The power is in the doing. That's the release- and the joy in being released, because you're rattling bones and making music.
March 1, 2009~ 7:45pm
Here's a bit of good advice...do not attempt -in a public venue- to explain the plot of a sad movie while that movie is still having a profound effect on your lachrymal glands.
I did this today in a restaurant with my mother. I told her all about 'Painted Veil'- and before you know it, I was weeping like a Pieta just as the waitress had brought my mother her stack of pancakes. She looked at us uncomfortably, feeling no doubt, that she'd interrupted a personal conversation- "Is three enough syrups?" she said as she placed the little plastic containers on the table. "Oh no," I said, sniffling and snotting and trying to make light, mascara running, "line 'em up. She drinks them like shots"- laughing and crying at the same time.
The waitress laughed shrilly, and beat a hasty exit.
"Wow. You really did like that movie," my mother said. "I'd like to see it." See? I come by my weepy nature directly through the bloodlines....I may look a mess, but I have a big old, patched-up heart. A sucker for every lost puppy story, every love gone wrong. You want a crier, look me up.
March 2, 2009~ 7:00pm
I'm just about ready to trot off to bed- trying to rid myself of this cold, which steals all my energy every day for the past week any time after 12 o'clock....noon...LOL!! But first, here's a picture that I found charming
(Sorta gives a whole fresh take on "a smile like the cat who ate the canary"- doesn't it? )
OH! And I heard from my friend Netto who read about how much I LOVEPhillip Philip Seymour Hoffman (I can't believe I've been spelling his name with too many L's. LOL!!) -and she's sending me MY OWN "Doubt" movie AS A GIFT! YIPPIEE! (She knew me back when Richard Burton had me in thrall) and now I am completely taken with the acting skills of this remarkable fella. If you want to see just a thumbnail of the way he can morph and surprise, take a look at these snapshots of the terrific films he's been in....what a fine performer he is! If you've seen either 'Capote' or 'Charlie Wilson's War'.....it's all you need see to get a feel for his range. Always moving. Always completely the role he happens to be playing. And always, always exciting.
March 4, 2009~ 6:45am
Made it through five hours at work yesterday, then had to come home. I could not GET WARM! This cold has lingered for a week, and it's wearing me down...
yes, I'm definitely "under the weather". Doggone change of seasons does this to me almost every year. Too hot/too cold, never just right. I'm staying put today and crawling under the covers to keep myself uniformly warm. Drinking fluids, reading and sleeeeeeeeeeeping. Carry on, folks. I'll join ya tomorrow.
***
(Return To Weekly Archives)
I finally sat down to watch "The Painted Veil"-- a 2006 movie based upon a W. Somerset Maugham novel-- and yes, the ending made me cry. Crying is a good thing when it comes from that place deep inside that's capable of feeling wounded by the varieties of beauty and pain found in the human condition-- and especially when it comes from that rare expanse where two people -so very different- forge a relationship despite impossible odds, and fall completely and devotedly in love.
I spoke about Ralph Fiennes eyes a while back and I now realize his female counterpart- with eyes every bit as luminous and heart-breakingly expressive, is Naomi Watts.
Naomi Watts has a haunting look that's difficult to stray from whenever the camera is on her; it's her magnificient ability to be completely and vulnerably open in front of the lens that permits an audience total entry into her. Edward Norton plays her bookish, preoccupied physician/husband, a bacteriologist more comfortable around microscopes than people, who is nonetheless smitten with Watts- a fairly vapid though gorgeous twenties society London ingenue whose mother is anxious to see her respectably 'married off'.
The setting is the mid 1920's in both London and China-- where a devastating cholera epidemic has broken out. Norton and Watts marry impulsively and are quickly bored with one another. Horribly mismatched as well as shallow in their decision to wed, it seems the recipe for disaster.
Naomi very quickly finds solace by bedding the husband of another society matron and when Norton finds out, he threatens her with divorce and disgrace unless she accompany him to the interior of China where he will be able to study the growing infectious outbreak. Since Watts' married paramour refuses to divorce his wife, she has no other choice but to travel along-- so a despairing Watts accompanies her estranged husband on his trek into the most primitive conditions imaginable: she simply has nothing left.
The scenery filmed in China is breathtaking --like something from a dream-- and as I sat on the floor cushions with my cat curled beside me, I glanced repeatedly at a large photograph I'd hung above the television of fog-tipped Chinese mountains that look for all the world like moss-covered great gumdrops stretching on forever. (That picture was at one time displayed at a local library, and I'd coveted it. My sweetie got it for me by asking the librarian if he could have it when they were through displaying the poster)-- and tonight there I sat.... watching a movie filmed on location in just such a place. A dreamscape- certainly.
The adversity... the isolation... the loneliness and regret... as well as a growing respect for her husband's dedication, allow Watts to see him in a different light. With both husband and wife caring more and more about the Chinese peasants in danger of contracting cholera- as well as tending them when they do- each begins to transform, and with that transformation so does the relationship between them. Norton finds a reawakening warmth toward his young wife as he watches her interact with the orphaned children...
and they fall finally --desperately-- happily in love.
Norton comes to understand that he'd married Watts for her beauty and Naomi realizes she was looking for an escape from an over-bearing mother by exerting an "I'll show her" attitude-- and both realize these were thin reasons indeed to wed. But seeing each other strive through the harshest conditions- he with his work in the clinic, she by working with the orphans of the village in a spare facility run by nuns
they begin view one another in entirely new ways as their loneliness, weariness - their mutual fears and isolation - draw them closer than anything else could.
Does it have a happy ending? Well, no....and yes. If you are tender-hearted you will definitely cry. But if you've grown along with the characters through their many ordeals, you will feel at the end that all pain has its purpose in life, and that we're tested in ways that- if not broken by them, will surely find us walking taller and straighter- and ultimately more fulfilled.
I wondered at the title, so looked it up. It's from a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Those who live call Life...
I knew one who had lifted it—he sought,
For his lost heart as tender, things to love,
but found them not"
That left me ruminating on the phrase "be careful what you wish for"...
but I believe it's only through dreaming-- and through the inevitable disappointments we endure in the course of our lifetimes, and by disturbing the 'status-quo' that we humans grow and thrive.
And I love the subtitle for the movie: Sometimes the farthest distance to travel is the one between two people.
This is a great heart-throb of a film.....and I loved it completely.
March 1, 2009~ 8:15am
Women artists. Before we visited my daughter tonight, Wayne was showing me a link from an old issue of The New York Times, to a female artist I'd never heard of....her name is Marlene Dumas, and her work is powerful and disturbing. If you have some time, read this fascinating article about a very independent and thoroughly compelling painter, whose work fetches in the millions.
Women are good at spilling secrets through art. I tried my own hand on the computer with a little piece doodled in Windows 'Paint'- called
Not Dumas, by any stretch....lol...still, art is a medium whereby we can enter states of consciousness that are more intuitive than waking life. More intuitive....often more candid. Try it. Don't be afraid of being amateurish. The power is in the doing. That's the release- and the joy in being released, because you're rattling bones and making music.
March 1, 2009~ 7:45pm
Here's a bit of good advice...do not attempt -in a public venue- to explain the plot of a sad movie while that movie is still having a profound effect on your lachrymal glands.
I did this today in a restaurant with my mother. I told her all about 'Painted Veil'- and before you know it, I was weeping like a Pieta just as the waitress had brought my mother her stack of pancakes. She looked at us uncomfortably, feeling no doubt, that she'd interrupted a personal conversation- "Is three enough syrups?" she said as she placed the little plastic containers on the table. "Oh no," I said, sniffling and snotting and trying to make light, mascara running, "line 'em up. She drinks them like shots"- laughing and crying at the same time.
The waitress laughed shrilly, and beat a hasty exit.
"Wow. You really did like that movie," my mother said. "I'd like to see it." See? I come by my weepy nature directly through the bloodlines....I may look a mess, but I have a big old, patched-up heart. A sucker for every lost puppy story, every love gone wrong. You want a crier, look me up.
March 2, 2009~ 7:00pm
I'm just about ready to trot off to bed- trying to rid myself of this cold, which steals all my energy every day for the past week any time after 12 o'clock....noon...LOL!! But first, here's a picture that I found charming
(Sorta gives a whole fresh take on "a smile like the cat who ate the canary"- doesn't it? )
OH! And I heard from my friend Netto who read about how much I LOVE
March 4, 2009~ 6:45am
Made it through five hours at work yesterday, then had to come home. I could not GET WARM! This cold has lingered for a week, and it's wearing me down...
yes, I'm definitely "under the weather". Doggone change of seasons does this to me almost every year. Too hot/too cold, never just right. I'm staying put today and crawling under the covers to keep myself uniformly warm. Drinking fluids, reading and sleeeeeeeeeeeping. Carry on, folks. I'll join ya tomorrow.
(Return To Weekly Archives)
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