If I were a movie

by Fernando Gil Paiva

When we read a book and then we have the chance to read it again after some years, it’s evident that the story is not the same anymore, and also the perception and the taste. The fact that we change makes the book – another book. Subjectivities, after all, are different. The same happens with a movie. Today you watch one that you saw a long time ago. In the beginning the screenplay is kind of lost, separated, but then you make the ideal of making over. In front of a story for the second time, we are able to re-see and re-start it with another point of view.

So, considering human being’s transitions and our own intrinsic developments, I started thinking that, if I were a movie… What movie would I be? And I can’t say another movie but Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). The movie expresses in a unique way the link between what is real and what is fictional. Mia Farrow and Jeff Daniels tell the story of a character that comes out of the film moved by the sadness of a constant spectator.

Since I was a child, my flying imagination was never something to be surprised with. I was more over there than here. I started writing when I was seven and my stories surrounded flying people worlds, envious animals, Christmas families, two-story houses “with elevators!” and other trips. Well, these things never disappeared, and they won’t. If the connections were once tenuous, now I get my free time to transport myself completely to my characters and to what they’re meant to be and live.

I’m the character who’s in front of the screen and I’m the one who comes out of it.

Real and unreal duplicity. Touchable Untouchable.

The movie inside the movie that Allen chose to be the connection was The Purple Rose Of Cairo. My connection isn’t still named after a film, but it has the information that explains itself by the words of the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli: “Everybody is from a place and believes from this place, that they have connections, but these places and connections will only assume their meanings, they need to be, in reality or fantasy, denied, overcame and transgressed”.