Considering photography and story telling are my two favorite things in a movie, I couldn’t help but marvel upon Eat, Pray and Love’s trailer the first time I saw it. The inquiries struck me when I faced these expectations. Will I like it? Will I hate it? Will I laugh? Will I cry? But more importantly, will it speak to me? This story, this photography, this movie did so.
Once I started my blog, I never thought I’d dedicate most of my entries to my experiences watching movies, but now that I think of it, I’ve always been fascinated about the stories in movies. And, ironically enough, the small details that I always find myself returning to for brief moments of inspiration are the same details that spoke to me once, speak to me now and allow me to speak to you through these rambling thoughts.
Countless are the times I’ve heard the stories in movies about people going somewhere else to ¨find themselves¨ and failing in the process only to discover that what they were missing was someone else, and we all know the rest. This story was nothing like that. It was rich, it was powerful and it was real. How easy it may sound to find yourself while on a year lasting trip only by eating and praying, but the story tells you the opposite: it’s difficult, it’s painful, it’s beautiful and worth it at the end. In Elizabeth Gilbert’s simple yet incredibly striking words: ¨ruin is the road to transformation¨.
Amazingly so, you could see the parallelism in the three trips she embarked on: while in Italy, everything was fun and joyful, but she wasn’t forced into finding herself yet, in fact, she dedicated most of her time in being surrounded by loved ones; while in India, the photography was ugly, not appealing to visit at all, and it was the one stop where the objective was to cope and deal with herself, being the hardest experience out of the three and in which it was more painful to look deeper within; and in Bali, the photography was beautiful, peaceful and charming, and it was the last stop of her journey where she so connected with herself and learned that she could do that and be in touch with others as well. The key? Balance.
An urge to read John Keats hit me after watching the film and I’d like to share a fragment of ¨From Sleep and Poetry¨:
¨Life is a rose´s hope while yet unblown;
The reading of an ever-changing tale;
The light up-lifting of a maiden’s veil;
A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air;
A laughing school-boy, without grief or care,
Riding the springy branches of an elm.¨
I used to look up on these movies with wishful thoughts about how much I would like to be a part of that. Wondered about where I’d have to go so I could experience what these fascinating characters went through. Luckily and strangely enough, I’m already on that journey and it’s more wonderful, beautiful and real than I could ever imagine.
-M.
