I got this suggestion from one of my favorite authors: Jason Pargin.
I had a visceral reaction to this movie.
I thought it would be an honest expression to capture it in a picture.
So I took the first one, and then, I thought I might take one more composed, pulled together.
So I snapped it off, standing in my bathroom that doesn’t now feel any more like my bathroom as standing on Venus:
I thought it honest. You can see the reaction.
When you take in the whole of the film, and the simple, basic human relationships, comparing it to my days and nights now, I couldn’t help it.
The ending broke me down – not for its sadness, but for its humanity – for all the simple moments of human connection, in a world, that at this time, feels so very full of loneliness.
So I swiped back to see what the first picture I took looked like – the honest, unposed, naked expression of the reaction welling up in and overwhelming me:
…and oh my God, I look so damn perfectly pathetic, if I didn’t know, I’d think it was posed.
I just lost it laughing.
Halfway through my hacking, laughing fit, I snagged a shot of my spontaneous LOL’ing. My whole world is having the final seams of it torn and the threads unraveling where the perfect stitches had once been.
All I can do is laugh.
This piece you’re reading here, this pictographic movie review, is maybe my most honest work yet, and is art imitating life imitating art:
In a last moment, I snapped off another picture, as I tried to move on from the wellspring of emotion.
The spastic waves of emotion and relatability, nay, fear that I’ll be, in some soon future time, able to relate to Hirayama *absolutely*, echoing through my heart, my mind, and the whole of my body, overwhelmed me. I wanted to capture the wbole of it.
Given my left kneecap doesn’t express the emptiness, dotted with moments of sublime, sheer joy, and deafening silence of a homeless man standing alone in his giant, empty house, I captured my face.
In the last moments, with this burst of all these emotions at once, I made some instinctive motion to try to pull myself together, like it didn’t matter and move on, blurring myself to the moment as though it never happened.
I immediately sat down around all the boxes, the clutter, clothes I was washing, and the only sounds being that of singular vehicles stochastically passing through South Derby along Rock Road, the tire and wind noise passing through my windows and over me.
I sat to write this, while I am still raw with the emotion it conjured.
Yeah.
I’m living a version of this movie, Perfect Days, right now.
I’d argue my life is the prequel.
Only difference is, I should maybe be a little more grateful to be alive.
I’ll work on it.
Or maybe I have that gift to look forward to.
