Happy birthday, Natalie.
In fact, I didn’t watch your films so much. I just only watched five films of yours: Black swan, Closer, Léon, Cold moutain, Thor. But two of them became my most favourite films: Closer, Léon. And both of them, I had watched last year. I liked them as the first minutes when I watched. But at that time, I didn’t know I would thought about them almost one year. From that day until now, the images from these two films sometimes float in my mind: the last scene when Alice walking on the street, Alice in the bar, Alice’s real name, Alice looks her own picture in that dark exhibition room… in Closer; the last scene when Mathilda comes back to the orphanage, when she puts the plant into earth, when she looks over the sky and thinks about Léon, when she puts the gun on her brow, when she knocks the door and wait for it open… in Léon. The melodies of two main song from these two film also keep wandering in my mind: Shape of my heart and The blower’s daughter. Specially, The blower’s daughter… I usually listened to it in morning when I had just waken up. The feeling when its melody flowed in my room space while there was still no light outside the window is hard to describe. Just like you can see some illusion beyond the curtain of the past as if you could touch it, feel it. The ending of the song, when he sings “…till I find somebody new”, his voice is so small and uncertainty with nearly no confidence. It makes that song more conflict and somehow ironical because in most of the length of its, he always sings that: “can’t take my eyes off you”. It showed that how hard to forget someone, how sad and short this love was, but also noticed that like everything in life, in some certain moments, we have to accept it, have to let it pass. The blower’s daughter made me feel the color of grey clearly. It has the sound that be grey. The grey of ashes from the past, the grey of the morning sky when there is no sunshine, the grey of the blue…
Thank you, Natalie. And also thank you, Alice and Mathilda. For teaching me that how beautiful loneliness is, how painful loss is, and how beautiful and painful at the same time love is… in this material world.
Kodaki's Film Corner 