I love it when people in movies watch movies.
I can think of many other favorite scenes, of characters watching a movie while in a movie (there was a very funny and moving scene in the recent 500 Days of Summer, with the young lovers watchingThe Graduate), but one of my favorite examples of this trope is from the Iranian film Leila (my review here).
In Leila, an Iranian married couple, Leila (played wrenchingly by Leila Hatami) and her husband Reza (played by Ali Mosaffa – I love this actor and his performance; these two are married in real life) sit and have dinner one night at home, after learning they cannot have children, and they watch Dr. Zhivago. They do not speak. They sit silently and watch Omar Sharif run through the ice house and smash the window to watch the sleigh disappear. As the scene goes on, slowly, Leila turns to look at Reza. And just as slowly, he turns to look back at her. No words. A marvelous silent scene of private domestic life, a moment of shared grief and loss. The news they have received is new, and disorienting. What will it mean now that they cannot have children?
I find it lovely and illuminating that the writers, Mahnaz Ansarian and Dariush Mehrjui (who also directed), made the choice that in the aftermath of the characters’ doctor’s visit, they do not sit and chat about what has happened, they do not make a plan, or discuss themselves and their future prospects. No. They make shish kebab in the backyard, and sit on the floor in their living room and watch a movie. Life is so often like that, and so often, in those moments of despair or duress, the right movie comes along at the right time, by a seeming coincidence, and, as if by magic, it helps you cut to the heart of your own personal experience. It shows you to yourself. Watching a movie can inform and reflect and distort your own experience, either by reiterating what you have and appreciate, or by highlighting what you lack.
I love movies, but I can count on one hand (okay, maybe two), the times in my life when a movie seemed to reach out through the darkness, and say, directly to me: “Here. Listen up. You need to hear this. Right now. Pay attention.” I have had intellectual revelations watching movies, moments I will never forget, when I am forced to think about things I might otherwise have ignored. But a visceral personal psychological response is much rarer (for me, anyway).
And it’s not necessarily just the great movies that do that for you. I have a soft spot in my heart for the mostly risible The Legend of Bagger Vance because it cut through the surface-mania of my survival techniques at the time and told me who I was, what I needed to work on, at that very moment. It was a terrible experience. I staggered out of the movie theatre in Times Square, feeling very quiet and still inside, made it all the way home before the storm broke. I cried for an entire night. Nonstop. I thought I was going crazy. The crisis passed, but I felt altered. I had been shown something. I have seen the movie since, and I actually find it disturbing now, in terms of its message, but my original point remains: For me, in that moment in Times Square, it was the right movie at the right time. That movie showed me something that I needed to be shown.
So, in Leila, a couple in the middle of a crisis that has broken them entirely, watch Dr. Zhivago, and in their expressions, as they watch, you can tell that it is no longer “just” a movie (if it ever was. Aren’t movies just projections of our dreams and fantasies and worst nightmares, sitting there, waiting for us to pick up on it, should we so desire, or feel compelled? Even the bad ones. They ALL are an opportunity.) I loved this wordless scene. You can see Omar Sharif reflected in their glass table, and the expressions on their faces says it all. Up until this moment in the film, they were a pair, giggling, laughing, talking, a real team. Now they are separated, each in their own individual pool of darkness … at the same time that possibly the biggest international Middle Eastern star in the history of cinema is glimmering up at them bluely from below. Showing them how to love. Showing them what love is, what it feels like, reflecting back to them their own experience, and deepening for them what is already there.
You don’t need words.
