Sunday, January 08, 2006

bonne année

The new year is already one week old, but I say my greeting anyway because I've only today returned to France. I spent Chrismas and New Year's with family and friends more or less far away. Today I came back from Indiana.

Exhausted from long hours of air and rail travel interrupted by extended waiting periods in chairs that looked like they were designed exclusively for the good looks, I put "Downfall" into my computer. Fifteen minutes later, after much subdued mumbling around me and countless furtive glances at the screen by my seat neighbors, I abruptly end the film. More than 20 hours into my voyage I don't feel like explaining to a Frenchman why I'm staring at Hitler and swastikas galore. This would be a challenging excercise even if it was three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon.

Instead, I opt for a rerun of "Crash", my clear favorite for movie of the year 2005. It's hard to say what the movie really is about. It is an intense, highly stylized and artistic parable of, well, of what? Of humans? Of live? Of ignorance? Of California? To me it is a reminder that every one is a racist, in that everyone has evident or subconscious racial preconceptions that influence how we interact with strangers. This in itself is no problem in my opinion, as long as we act with compassion and humanity and are never locked in our judgment.

"Crash" traces 36 hours in the lifes of about two handful of people whose paths cross over and over again, often unknown to them. Tragedy and happiness, drama and joy, crime and charity, love and hate are so close together that one single action of any one of the actors, even one word or a mere gesture, can tip the scale into one or the other direction.

Before the movie ends, I arrive in Grenoble. Walking through the dark city, my own little multiracial home, I pass Lebanese kebab shops and Armenian grocery stores, Chinese restaurants and African art galleries. I buy a baguette, which doubles as a handwarmer, pass by my favorite Vietmamese store where the smells of tea, spices and overripe bananas unmistakably tell me that I've arrived, enter my entryway and am home.

Happy new year to all who happen to read this.

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