Weekend Update: Do Something
Kathleen took yesterday off, so that she could see Julie & Julia with me. Determined to prevent my seeing the movie without her, she also knew that I would never agree to await her convenience. There’s more to it than that: I simply won’t go to the movies after 1 PM at the latest. I’m at my best, movie-goer-wise, before lunch and in an empty theatre.
We got the Orpheum — just around the corner — about forty minutes before show time. There was already a line (of one). When the movie finally got rolling, after yards of pathetic ads and mis-matched trailers (Roland Emmerich as a Nora Ephron appetizer?), the auditorium was at least half-full, a truly remarkable turnout. Trust me: I should know.
After the movie, we returned to the apartment so that I could change into clothes more appropriate for Midtown. We weren’t going to Midtown, but to a neighborhood widely known as Lenox Hill but that I increasingly think of as “Little Mad,” because so many stylish shops seem to have have abandoned Madison Avenue for the stretch of Third between 72nd and 79th. Because of the glorious weather, Kathleen wanted to have lunch outside; and, because of the movie, I knew that the only restaurant for me was Orsay, on Lex at 75th.
If you’ve already seen Julie & Julia, and you’ve been to Orsay, you’ll know why. It’s a matter of lace curtains, etched windows, and vaguely art-déco paneling. The food is very good, but the food is very good at a lot of places; and in any case, food wasn’t the point. After two hours of watching a movie about food and cooking, I was eating with my eyes.
Some movies are very seductive. Chinatown, for example. For days after the first time — the first couple of times — that I saw Chinatown, it was hard to know whether I was living in Los Angeles in the mid-Thirties or Houston in the mid-Seventies. It wasn’t that I had a preference for one or the other. At a deep, emotional level, I was confused. Eventually the confusion wore off: powerful as they were, Roman Polanski’s visions of California were no match for Houston’s weather. A more recent seduction was accomplished by the markedly unseductive De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (The Beat My Heart Skipped). For a few days after that introduction to the magic of Romain Duris, I didn’t really know French from English.
You would expect Julie & Julia to seduce me, and, once upon a time, I’m sure that it would have done. Instead, though, it posed a kind of reckoning. Pointing a finger right at me, the movie wanted to know what I had done with my life. As an ageing blogger beset by the conviction that he is on to something, if he could only figure out what it is, I hardly knew which woman’s predicament seemed more like my own. I may not have been seduced, but I was certainly confused, and, as usual, this meant that my eyes were in a state of spillover.
I will say this: happy and supportive marriages play the leading supporting role in Julie & Julia. So I was hugely grateful to Kathleen for taking the day off, and making sure that I did not discover the movie without her arm linked through mine.