I've Loved You So Long

For four and a half months after Winston’s birth, I did not go to the theater once or rent a movie once, although I had always loved movies. Last week, since I had a free afternoon, I decided to watch a movie in the theater. I heard that they made a movie about Amelia Earhart, and I have always loved biographical films. After checking out the show times the day before, I happily set out for the theater after lunch and after feeding and burping Winston.

I showed up at the Century Theaters in Tanforan Shopping Mall, which is close to both my office and rental house. Then I looked and looked, and could not find “Amelia” at all on the billboard. Finally, I asked the ticket agent, who told me that the last day for the movie was yesterday! Later when I told Michael about it, he laughed and said that the movie was so bad that they had to cancel the shows before the initial advertisements had finished their run.

Since I could not find any other movies worth watching in the theatre, I decided to go to Blockbuster. I recognized quite a few films that I was planning to see a few months before, so I picked “The Edge of Love” about Dylan Thomas and the two women in his life, starring Kiera Knightley and Sienna Miller, and “I’ve Loved you So Long”, a French movie starring the English actress Kristin Scott Thomas.

“The Edge of Love” is a complete disappointment, as it was utterly pointless. In a way, it was as if the filmmaker was given a homework assignment to make a movie, when he really did not have any ideas at all at the time. The only useful learning from this movie is that ALL poets in movies are selfish lunatics.

Then it took almost 3 nights for me to watch “I’ve Loved You So Long”, partly because it was a slow film, partly because I could only watch it after Winston went to sleep at night and I was usually very tired then as well. He’s such a sweet little angel that he already sleeps 10-11 hours straight through the night on most days, but occasionally he would wake up in the middle, sometimes due to a belly ache, sometimes due to a nightmare, and sometimes due to other inexplicable reasons. While he has been “sleeping like a baby”, I still wake up once or twice in the middle of the night, and I would tiptoe to his bedroom, and listen through the door.

After going through an hour of a typical French movie (i.e. nothing happens, people talk a lot, they smoke and drink and eat, and they talk some more existential nonsense), it was finally revealed why Juliette (played by Kristin Scott Thomas) was in prison for 15 years for murdering her 6-year old son, seemingly without any reasons. He had a terrible terminal disease that caused him excruciating pain, and his mother could not bear to see him suffer any more. When Juliette finally broke her silence and told her sister, I found myself bursting into tears while she was describing how she put her son finally to peace and held him the whole night after she injected him. She screamed, “I wanted to go to prison then. The worst prison is the death of one’s child - You can never get out of this prison. I was guilty because I gave birth to him and then condemned him to death with this disease. ” A movie that is perhaps otherwise mediocre did catch my attention at last because it caught the attention of a mother desperately in love with her son, as Juliette was equally madly in love with her son.

At that moment, my darling little boy Winston was still sound asleep in his crib. I thought to myself how I really have to treasure every moment of Winston’s laugh. To freshen up, I went to take a shower and wiped away all those tears for a fictitious little boy. When I got out of the shower, the very real boy Winston was awake already, with his eyes wide open, quietly lying in his crib. I looked into that sweet little face of his, and thought, “oh sweetie I’ve loved you so long and I will love you forever.” He smiled that angelic smile and his face looked even chubbier…