I once experienced the most vivid sense of Deju Vu. It was having met a young woman in Copenhagen, my first trip to Europe in 1968, as a single man of 28. We were not in love, but we connected. We were going "steady" for a few days...and I was staying at her apartment, where she was living with a family.
She was a long term visitor from Poland, and in some ways we didn't even connect, but there was the strongest sense of being on a treadmill, where my destiny was pre-ordained. Although I was in a strange city, I felt amazingly comfortable.
I'm not a mystic, so I attribute it to a combination of jet lag, or the sun rising in the middle of the May night, of a combination of irreality, and absolute physical-sexual comfort. It never happened before...or again.
Now about the film. In spite of my relating to the Deja Vu aspect, I found the conversation lacking in spontaneity or in believability. I always gauge the quality of a film by the minor characters, are they more than placeholders to complete a plot. The wife and fiancé of the two central characters were just that, each so devoid of realism that the kind of sympathy for someone who is perfunctorily discarded is avoided.
And then there's the song, " They'll be blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover...." the beautiful tune that evokes a moment in history, a time when the lives of vital young men were as fragile as a kitten loose in Trafalgar Square. It was a time when a glance between two people, a connection, could mean that if taken, if grasped, they might have a moment of joy, of completion, that very likely could be the only such taste of life of the man facing probable death.
"......tomorrow when the world is free," was understood to be a tomorrow that one of them would never see, that could only be lived in the memory of one whom he loved, if the love was taken at that moment, never to be offered again.
I don't know whether those born after those years can understand what the song meant. And perhaps for those who loved the film, the connection was made, and for those I'm glad the film gave them a slight whiff of those now forgotten days.
She was a long term visitor from Poland, and in some ways we didn't even connect, but there was the strongest sense of being on a treadmill, where my destiny was pre-ordained. Although I was in a strange city, I felt amazingly comfortable.
I'm not a mystic, so I attribute it to a combination of jet lag, or the sun rising in the middle of the May night, of a combination of irreality, and absolute physical-sexual comfort. It never happened before...or again.
Now about the film. In spite of my relating to the Deja Vu aspect, I found the conversation lacking in spontaneity or in believability. I always gauge the quality of a film by the minor characters, are they more than placeholders to complete a plot. The wife and fiancé of the two central characters were just that, each so devoid of realism that the kind of sympathy for someone who is perfunctorily discarded is avoided.
And then there's the song, " They'll be blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover...." the beautiful tune that evokes a moment in history, a time when the lives of vital young men were as fragile as a kitten loose in Trafalgar Square. It was a time when a glance between two people, a connection, could mean that if taken, if grasped, they might have a moment of joy, of completion, that very likely could be the only such taste of life of the man facing probable death.
"......tomorrow when the world is free," was understood to be a tomorrow that one of them would never see, that could only be lived in the memory of one whom he loved, if the love was taken at that moment, never to be offered again.
I don't know whether those born after those years can understand what the song meant. And perhaps for those who loved the film, the connection was made, and for those I'm glad the film gave them a slight whiff of those now forgotten days.