The Double, Triple, Hidden Life of Me

In rediscovering the fictions of my youth, I’ve been remembering the world as I imagined it as an impressionable teenager, filled with romance and an imagination fueled by European arthouse movies where melancholy was almost certainly the order of any given day. I couldn’t swear to what prompted by interest in the movies of Krzysztof Kieślowski and his ilk — I feel as if, at some point in my mid-teens, I told myself that my thing was going to be that I was a movie fan and so I bought the magazines and the books I thought that was supposed to entail, and suddenly I was let loose in a world of influences and stories I had no business in.

(What prompted this belief that I was into The Art of Cinema? I genuinely have no recollection, but I do remember subscribing to Empire and Sight and Sound at an inexplicably young age, even if the latter was something I only read a handful of times before I lost interest in how humorless and sterile it all seemed at the time; Empire, which sought to bring a music paper sensibility to movie writing, was far more my speed and I kept that up for years after.)

However I ended up in that mindset, there was a point in my mid-teens where I was increasingly watching European movies about the existential weight of the world in which effortlessly beautiful actresses pouted and frowned when faced with the meaningless cruelty of the world, surrounded by old men who also frowned but found new life when faced with their decades-younger, naive-but-somehow-wise muses. (I still love things like The Double Life of Veronique or Three Colours Red, but it’s easy to see in them the roots of what would become the Manic Pixie Dream Girl cliche of American cinema years later, alas.)

Rewatching such movies now, they’re still filled with breathtaking, aching moments of real beauty, of human frailty and kindness and all kinds of feelings that words struggle to conjure. But I also see in them the beginnings of my overly romantic, melancholy nature and a tendency to tell myself a story in which sadness and pain can be noble or meaningful when the reality is something far more banal and empty. If I hadn’t fallen for such pretty sorrow in these movies as a teenager, how much of my life would’ve been different years, decades, later?

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