Rather than braining today, I’m celebrating still being alive, so don’t expect substantive posts today. It’s the holidays, after all. As always, I do my best.
This Iranian film is perhaps the most powerful two-minute movie I’ve ever seen. It took me a while to understand what was happening (and the subtitles don’t help much), as I first watched it on the tweet below that Matthew sent. If you follow the threads in both tweets, you’ll get a fuller understanding.
It’s an ineffably sad and moving two minutes. I suppose most Iranians would understand it right off the bat, but we need a bit of detail.
The YouTube movie is missing one important bit at the beginning: when the woman asks her husband, “Give me one that starts with the letter ‘A’.”
The tweets, each followed by an explanatory thread:
For those who don't understand Farsi: They're playing a Persian poetry game–each person has to recite a poem that starts with the last letter of the previous one's. The one recited is a love poem that can also be humanity and being kind to the living before we leave this world.
— Aty S. Behsam (@ASBehsam) December 28, 2019
Understandable in any language I think. Like the flowers, however, the peace is only temporary.
Wow. That may have been shot on digital, but, as Jean Luc Godard said, cinema is truth at 24 frames per second.
Very touching.
Beautiful. And sad.
The deeper thought is that his love for her lives on, even after she’s gone. And he shared that love with others.
Very moving.
Thanks for posting, Jerry!
Women’s delight in receiving flowers has always puzzled me. I mean, I have always loved flowers and when I had a garden I grew them in profusion. I delighted in their beauty, delicacy and evanescence. Enjoy them while they are here!
But for women given flowers, it seems to me there is something more. As illustrated here, actually. The flowers come from the older man to the the younger one. But the intention is that he gives (re-gifts, if you must) them to his wife. Flowers are a special gift. Capable, as here, of bringing harmony.
Why?
My mischievous conclusion (thinking back to my courting days, when I would offer a bunch of flowers to my date) is this: Hmm, flowers are the sexual organs of plants; I was shoving my intentions in her face…
I think the idea is just to defuse the argument by interruption, & that happens. The flowers are not a solution, merely a way introducing beauty into an ugly situation.
Thank you for posting, and have a great birthday, Jerry!
Wow, that really knocked my socks off. More days of no-braining, please!
Beautiful
Thank you so much for this!! I hear such awful news of Muslim countries where men abuse their wives (kind of like the man in the next car) and treat them like chattel. And I wonder, Don’t men love women in some countries?
And then I remind myself that abuse happens here, too! That’s what battered women’s shelters are for.
This is a complicated topic. It seems to me that Abrahamic religions have a way of promoting or at least condoning abuse and violence against women. But religion is by no means the only thing.
On to better things…
I get that it’s Coynezaa today! Hooray! I hope PCCe had a happy one.
I took away from the film that the Thursday appointment is where he goes every week to place flowers on his wife’s grave. She isn’t in the car the poetry game is a memory. Because the little boy says the flowers are from the gentleman in the next car… He doesn’t say they’re from the couple in the next car.