The English Patient

The English Patient (1996)

a film by Anthony Minghella

Chungking Express (Bonus Track)

Chungking Express (1994)

a film by Wong Kar-wai

Chungking Express was the movie I never saw and everyone recommended. The zeitgeist that past in front of my eyes and I couldn't see. But armed with a wheat beer and escaping the summer rain I play this filmed and meet another cinema-fairy that at the rhythm of The Cranberries crawled into my memory. Vertiginous at times and emotional and sweetly melancholic in others, Chungking Express lived up to its promises delivering a fresh and memorable piece of cinema, that populates the memory with lots of sweet images and left me craving for Hong Kong fast food.

Breathless

Breathless (1960)

a film by Jean-Luc Godard

Despite the romance of the Nouvelle Vague, Breathless didn't catch me in a cinémathéque while surrounded by bohemian-Gauloises-smoking-movie-loving intellectuals. I dreamed of watching Breathless with the characters of Bertolucci's The Dreamers: living la boheme while the world was accelerating its turning but all that mattered was going on in the screen. But of course it wasn't the case. It wasn't a crowd of cinephiles in front of Parisian screen but a lonely evening in front of my TV when the Torontonian summer timidly showed it face.

It made no difference, Belmondo is still as chauvinistic as charming, Jean Seberg keeps being a fairy in my cinematographic dreams and Breathless feels like a glass of fresh water for the senses. The shoot sounded like a thunder, the ending credits rolled and at breath's end I come back from the beauty of Paris in black and white to the corner my couch.

Jaws

Jaws (1975)

a film by Steven Spielberg

Andrei Rublev (Bonus Track)

Andrei Rublev (1966)

a film by Andrei Tarkovsky

Making a bell in the middle ages and surviving a Mogol invasion must have been really hard and both moments come to life in this spiritual and artistic epic story. Andrei Rublev is a spiritual experience, a document and a piece of art in movement about an artist's search for God and the paths of life in a world that is crumbling.