Why I Love Film – Chapter One
*** Burke Commentary ***
On Wednesday night (June 23), I went for a haircut. Bizarre way to begin a post about why I love film so much, but bear with me. I went to my neighborhood, economically viable barber shop and stepped inside. Oddly enough, I had just finished a great discussion over the phone with my Brother regarding some of Coppola’s movies when my name was called and I was shown the chair. Sitting down I observed my barber. 5’2”, maybe 5’3”, in her fifties, her hair reminded me of some of the late 60’s styles. She had gold glasses, not too big for her face, a simple dress under her apron and flat shoes for comfort in standing for eight hours, no doubt. This lady also had a stern look about her, like Grandma used to have when she’d had enough of my shenanigans. Regardless, I sat down and described the cut I desired, and she started off. As I looked at her in the mirror, I remembered her cutting my hair a long time ago. I had started using another barber at the shop, but then she left and now I was apparently back to this lady. I wondered where she was from? Since I was in Westwood, a predominantly Persian neighborhood, I guessed she might be –
“So, how was your day, sir?” she asked. I’m one of those people who don’t mind being called sir, so I said, “It was pretty good: but we’re rather busy this time of year, so…” She narrowed her eyes, nodded and said, “Oh? What is it you do?” As she went through the motions of my trim, I spared her the details but essentially told her I work in advertising on the movie business. “Movies?” she said, stopping the process of cutting my hair, looking at me squarely in the eye in the mirror. “Yep,” I nodded, “It’s pretty busy around this time of year, you know, between May and August, and then the holiday season…”
My barber nodded to herself and thoughtfully went on trimming. “Have you seen any movies lately, yourself?” I asked her. “No,” she frowned and shook her head slightly. “So you don’t go to the movies regularly, huh?” I continued, trying to use this haircut as an opportunity to conduct a one-on-one focus group (I’m such a company man!). “Oh, no,” my barber replied, shaking her head more vigorously. “Well, what about at home? You prefer TV when you watch at home?” I continued. “Yes…” thought my barber for a minute, “I saw The Fugitive on television lately.” And she went on cutting my hair.
Well, I’m the one that stopped in my tracks and said, “Aw! That’s a great film! Harrison Ford, Tommy Lee Jones… plenty of action!” My barber stopped once again and looked at me in the mirror and said, “You know this film?” “Absolutely!” I exploded, “That’s a quality film. Isn’t that a great scene when they’re in the tunnel, and Tommy Lee Jones drops his gun, Ford picks it up and says ‘I didn’t kill my wife’ and Jones says ‘I don’t care!’ So good!” Incidentally, I put up my own hands slightly as I said this, just enough to throw the dead hair off of my poncho onto the floor in the process of quoting the movie. Anyhow, the little barber stared at me in the mirror for a couple seconds. “When did you see this movie?” she asked. “Oh, a while back, but I remember it pretty well.” She continued trimming and said, “Yes, I suppose for your job…”
We continued our exploration of why The Fugitive is such a great film, the highlight of which was her clarification on Tommy Lee Jones’ name. “How you say that man… (waving the shears in her hand) the one who tells Harrison in the end that he cares? Tomley June?” I helped her pronunciate Jones’ name correctly, and then we moved on. She contradicted herself by admitting that she had gone to the theater to see April’s release of Death at a Funeral, which is a Chris Rock film and a remake of a British film from a few years back. Her major complaint with that film wasn’t anything related to the movie itself, it was how far she had to walk from the parking lot to the theater! On a more general note, I was able to identify the reason she disliked most American movies was the copious amounts of sex, drugs and violence.
We then progressed to foreign films when she asked if I only watched movies from “this country”. I started rattling off some of my favorites from France and other places and then she interrupted with, “Do you watch any India films?” Again, I nodded vigorously in the mirror and said, “I love Bollywood movies! They’re always breaking into song and then cutting to a chase scene and then a love scene after that… they’re crazy!” Well, Ester – we were on a first name basis by this point – started to describe this Bollywood film that must have been based on King Lear, because it was all about a gardener and his crazy family and how he adopted a street urchin and started to raise him, etc, etc… It turns out Ester is a Persian exile who lived in Pakistan after the fall of the Shah in the late 1970s. She told me this as the conversation went from our mutual interest in Bollywood to how close India is to Pakistan, further to how she lived there for a while and perhaps she’ll tell me her story some time and “you can make millions!”
I’m skipping the details on the Bollywood portion so I can (finally) get to my point here: movies have this tremendous capacity to connect people. I think you could tell from the beginning of the story that I didn’t expect anything more out of my haircut than shorter, better looking hair. However, as soon as Ester navigated the discussion to movies, suddenly we had all kinds of things in common – her, a Persian exile having lived through God knows what, and me, a little film buff who grew up comfortably in Cincinnati, OH.
Lots of film industry folks, from actors to producers, from critics to bloggers, talk about how they’re in love with the “Magic” of movies. Sometimes, I think it’s natural to feel like that magic might be gone. I can see how some folks get disillusioned with bad movies (particularly if they see several in a row), DVDs that now include the “here’s how we did it” features and to a certain extent, the greed of film makers (“She made how much? For that drivel???”). But it’s discussions like I had with Ester – a nice, Persian lady in her 50s who cuts hair – which I find truly magical. Consider, Ester stopped me as I left to give me a note with the name of the Bollywood movie “The Gardener” – in English and in Farsi.