Journey into the spiritual
We went to see Tree of Life last night, winner of the Cannes Film Festival, and a departure from the norm. An escape from reality. A deep dive into the juxtaposition of loss reality and accumulated myth. A truly remarkable film in that even though dinosaurs appeared at one point causing the entire row in front of us (and us included) to erupt in the giggles, it still managed to keep us all in the theater on a Saturday night and not walk out like we thought we might do at one point.
There is no time organization to the film, there are babies who become children and then there are adults who never seem to age as their children do. There are big splashy scenes about eruption and waves and end of world apocalyptic wonder and there is serenity and musical rise and fall.
I wonder what we watched last night, it wasn’t a film.
We left the theater in our drug like state and ran into friends coming out of Midnight in Paris, one exclaimed “I’m glad I went to college because I got all the references” and we said, “We’ve just journeyed into weird.”
Then we slogged our way through the Essence traffic closing down the French Quarter streets and causing traffic to come to a standstill on Canal Street, a street now given over to junk shops and athletic shoes but once the grand dame of shopping in this city where my mother took us as girls with her gloves and hat decades ago. We made our way across town and now that it was late over to Beach Corner where we bellied up to the bar and split a burger and played Essence-like music on the jukebox – Usher, Chaka Khan, Beyonce, Mary Blige.
I woke with the same feeling I had last night when I went to sleep, a feeling that I had ventured into something and become exhausted by it, and I still have a lingering feeling that the world is much vaster than I would ever be able to imagine. So weird or not, I’m going to recommend you see Tree of Life, because I don’t think any book or other film or work of art is going to give you that experience.