(Going back a bit in time here - I think this is over two weeks ago now...)

After the sort of Saturday where I was too knackered to even move (it was that sort of Friday night...), it was good to go out and have a jam-packed-Sunday - even if my mission to Camden to get a space-gun-belt-buckle (I swear, I have seen one before, it was the best thing ever) was thwarted by a singular lack of said accessories.  All was made well by New-World-Dim-Sum (with carts!  And in threes, which is perfect, because the good dishes always come in threes...) and a trip to the Curzon to see The Science of Sleep.

The movie was an absolute delight, I don't care what anyone says.  Actually, it was the sort of film that I'm honestly suspicious and a bit distrustful of people who didn't enjoy it, because there was so much joy and love contained in it.  Subsequent discussions with friends have suggested that some people question whether the film actually gave anything, and whether it lacked a plot.  We'll ignore the last point, because the best films usually ignore it as well.  But as for giving something...  I think Science of Sleep was really, truly and honestly about sharing worlds, which is so fundamentally human that is is often rushed over in the quest to tell us something that is Absolutely True (and therefore impossible).

I can't help but compare it to my most-hated-and-loathed film, which was about someone with a flaky world view that you just had to buy into because it was so sweet and wacky and charming etc etc etc.  This film was different - I think that it held true in terms of some of the difficulties, some of the dangers, and some of the cruelties of having a world of one's own so specific.  Our main female character (again, I think she was great, despite other's criticisms) is not 'blank' - she is as living as the protagonist, with his fantastic elaborate creations (I loved the craft and mechanical elements throughout - memories for me of childhood rust and cardboard collections) and blurring of narrative and dream - her struggle to get into his world is as important to the film as his (psychedelic, dream-fueled, nostalgia-tinged, toy-filled[!]) world itself.

As a kid who was, perhaps, a bit much to take in my obsessive narrativization of the world, and my early aesthetic fascism, I was very taken with how completely realized/ internally consistent the world that the film/Stephane created was.  Every bit played its cabalistic role - not just the scene of the perfect chord to float clouds, but the smaller and more subtle (and of course then to me all the more significant/ metonymical) scene of composing a piece of music for a piano with missing chords.  Every bit played a part, as beautifully and awkwardly as cellophane water.

Watching it in cinema was fantastic - when lines like 'unpretentious tits' came up, you could hear the genuine laughter.  It was a very different sound than usual - it was joy that people were laughing with, myself included.  At one point, I was holding my face because my cheeks hurt so much from smiling.

Even the awkward bits (lines about having no teeth to give better blow jobs) to me were as perfectly realized as the design of his childhood room, and there was a great deal of love for the main character, without being overly flattering or even necessarily excessively sympathetic.

To me, the film gave plenty - it shared a world (which in the end, is what being in the world is about), but it also showed not just the funny 'whimsical' bits, but some of the hard parts of being so specific - and some of the spaces of comfort from the attack.

And so, in that spirit, a picture of one of my favorite spaces of comfort in London: