A Lovely Film

Once in a while I get a flash of just pure happiness. The other night, I almost didn't get into the film screening - I found out about it half an hour before it was going to start, and it was being shown at a location nearly two miles away from my apartment (hence, the racing). When I got there, I hadn't RSVPd and the screening was booked up. I hung around in the entryway, trying to look pitiful and stand kind of in the way so that the organizers would want to let me in, to get rid of me. Finally they nodded and said I could go in, just as the film was starting. Yessss.

The film was wonderful. It was about a year in the life of a tiny farm in the Netherlands, that a couple in their 70s still work all by themselves. Long, paced shots of the old man doing patient work: milking cows, melting the ice in their trough with hot water from a kettle, carrying hay bales, sowing by hand, tasting the grain kernels to see if the grain was ripe for harvesting. Everything he did, he did with the skill of a lifetime of experience, but also with obvious effort - a lot of it was really heavy work, especially for a man his age. Meanwhile, his wife did the cooking and laundry (by hand), and pored through farm catalogs at their tiny kitchen table. I could tell how the kitchen would smell, how everything in the house would have that musty, old-person, comfortable smell. Their nostalgic commentary on the problems of overproduction, subsidies, the mechanization of agriculture, and social change was fascinating to me. I also loved seeing how they did things - watching her pluck and prepare a chicken, watching him pitch hay to make a haystack. I've never seen anyone do these things before, and I feel like they're something of a dying art. Overlaid on these themes was the pathos of the fact that no one would inherit their farm, their son having chosen not to become a farmer - so they were farming it, in her words, "for no one," just working every day until the inevitable time when one of them would suffer an accident or ill health. Although it was obviously a hard life, they both said they wouldn't have chosen any other. And the farm itself was beautiful - long landscapes with straight rows of trees marking the field divisions, flooded with pure, clean light like in Vermeer paintings. I came out of the film glowing.

As if that wasn't enough, afterwards they served us wine and there were trays piled with cheese and green grapes. I stood there sipping my wine feeling just really happy and grateful that I got that experience.