Prime (2005)

The last time I saw this film, I didn't quite like it. I thought it was kind of clueless and nonsense, delivering no specific message. Yet after accidentally watching it again on HBO today, it changed my mind.

The last scene was really touching. For one moment, when Rafi noticed Dave peeking on her through the restaurant window, and gave back that slight smile, I felt like weeping. It was a matter of seconds in the film, but a total condensed, strong, and powerful scene. It was then that I learned that this was the concluding gesture of the whole movie.

I cannot imagine how unendurable it is for that long period of separation to really take place and become an accepted truth. Movies are always about the protagonists. The major parts. The central event. Things and people that really count at last. That is why I felt so unendurable to witness the fading away of what should have, or might have, become the major part of life. When we so wanted for something to become what would last or where we would end up, it makes it exceptionally cruel to not only lose it, but to retrace it from the "main" point of view.

What's worse in the film is the forced confrontation of a face-to-face reunion with that loss. When looking back to the past, it is merely history, something that is settled and cannot be changed thus requiring no further investigations. But looking to it in the very present is like a evoking that time when different decisions were made, as if it were a reproduction of those happy and heartbreaking recollections. It might just as well kill us with the pain.

The best thing about that scene in the film is that neither Rafi nor Dave had another story going on in the present, which means you cannot avoid the pain of facing this moment by trying to convince yourself that "it's nothing but something beautiful from the past, and now I have moved on, to someone where with someone else, so let's focus on this main part of life." Well, maybe she has, maybe he didn't. But all these interlaced and complicated feelings and memories from the past are condensed into that very single moment, when he peeked on her through that window, and she noticed, and she looked at him, and almost like hesitating for one second, and then?

And then she gave the slightest smile. Probably with some connotation.