Secrets and Lies

Untold secrets.  Truth and lies.  Without these, we'd have little literature.

On Friday night, I planned to start watching a film Gerlinde recommended, then go to sleep: The Retrieval.  I thought I'd watch just enough to get hooked, then finish watching today.  Like a  good book, I couldn't put it down.  It's a beautiful film that moves slowly along the ground, yet the closeup shots of the faces of the main characters takes you into every conflicting feeling.  This is a film I'll definitely watch again.

After it ended, I saw "If you liked this film, you'll like...."

It was after midnight, but again I thought I'd watch just enough of The Human Stain to jostle me out of the Civil War era film.  Again, I wound up watching the whole story.  Based on a novel by Phillip Roth, it centers around a powerful secret--and how that secret impacts the main character's entire life.

Tonight, Freda and I went to see Far From the Madding Crowd--an excellent film version of the Hardy novel I haven't read since high school.  Sometimes secrets are what we don't admit to ourselves.

I'd like to read the novels on which these films are based.  I think now of how I read certain books in high school without understanding or having a big enough view of the world to understand them.  I read voraciously.  I lugged books home from the library and stayed up late night reading.  But at the time, I didn't understand the universal themes that drove the plots.