There are films I watch for a single scene only, but to appreciate that scene, you have to see the whole film. Like the one in Marianna Palka’s Motherhood, also known as Egg, where conceptual artist Tina asks Karen, her friend since art school, who is now eight months pregnant and came with her husband to visit her, just as the guests were about to leave her apartment, to send her a picture of Elliot when he is born, thus reviling the gender of the expected child to the father. It may sound unremarkable, but it’s not. That single scene in an otherwise mediocre film is like a little gem found in the ashes, as beautiful as unexpected. And it’s the same in life, with those rare moments we encounter in the currents of everyday mundanity. We tend to forget them quickly, but eventually learn to treasure them and cling to them like a lifebuoy.
It reminds me of the words of George Falconer, the protagonist in A Single Man played masterfully by Colin Firth, who says in the dénouement: “A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp. And the world seems so fresh, as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realise that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.”
And the most important part is that these moments are derivatives of our perception, not expenditures. We don’t have to travel thousands of miles or spend a substantial amount of money. All that is required is a slight shift in optics, perhaps some fine-tuning of the soul. And then even exchanging a glance from a distance with a fox in the middle of the city during an evening stroll takes on a transcendental dimension.
