*I am traveling right now, and am uneasy and anxious. Interestingly, in the past few days I’ve found myself yearning for the comfort of Juliette Binoche’s breasts in Certified Copy, and so I am reposting*
I watched Certified Copy on a plane. I watched it on my laptop sitting between an older man and an older woman, and so the three of us watched the film together. They in secret glances here and there, and I, aware of their curiosity, in varying states of self consciousness. This is the inevitable consequence of personal movie viewing in public spaces, but as we three watched, these lines appeared and to my horror, I began to cry.
“Look at your wife, who has made herself pretty for you.”
Bearing witness to a stranger’s unexpected emotional vulnerability results in an uncomfortable domino effect of exposure. And so, because my sniffles betrayed me, our whole row became connected in a strange and awkward way. Apart from violence, nothing changes the air more instantaneously than tears shed amongst strangers.
All is ripe for speculation.
And as I did small things to feign non-crying casualness, like coughing and rustling in my bag, I was reminded of a story. Many years ago a friend of my parents needed to phone them following an emotionally upsetting fight with her husband. This was in the age of pay phones and she could not call from home. Dreading being spotted sobbing in a phone booth, she decided to make the call the only place her tears would be perceived as appropriate: The hospital. This story was relayed to me and I have always regarded it as a brilliantly heroic manipulation of perception. This is the same subjectivity of reality that Certified Copy explores.