do NOT watch this film

Last year, ABC TV screened a film by Richard Curtis (you know: Four Weddings & a Funeral, Love Actually, Notting Hill, etc, etc…), who, intriguingly, describes it as the film he is “most proud of”. I don’t think it did well at the box office.

The film – “The Girl in the Cafe” starring a favourite of ours, Bill Nighy, is a poignant, gentle, achingly lovely story about an encounter between a middle-aged civil servant working for the British Chancellor of the Exchequer and an enigmatic young woman who lives with great personal pain.

Alright so far, and enough to lull one into a false sense of security as the film unfolds with all the expected Curtis humour and pathos.

Don’t watch this film! It will sneak up on you and grab you where it hurst the most. If you are a person of conscience, you will either end up changing things about the way you live your life (maybe small things, maybe huge areas of your life), or you will have to live with your conscience ever after. You have been warned.

Tamara bought me the DVD as a gift, knowing how much the first viewing of the film meant to me. I have just (foolishly) watched it again during some precious time alone.

I have tried to do my little bit over more than a decade to make a difference both as a volunteer and in a paid capacity involved in the Jubilee 2000 and Millenium Development Goals projects and refugee resettlement. I’ve organised public events; done media work; chased signatures for petitions; addressed high school and university groups, churches and service clubs; made financial donations and sacrifices; personally petitioned politicians; publicly picketed politicians; listened to bloody-minded individuals (as well as well-meaning individuals) who have wanted to ‘set me straight’; encouraged and supported others of like-mind as they did their bit; helped out individuals in extreme poverty as best I could, advocating for them, and on occasion doing back-breaking practical, physical, and sometimes personally dangerous things to help out.

Yet, still…click your fingers every three seconds. Listen to the cadence. A child dies of preventable causes with each click.

Don’t watch this beautiful, powerful, heart-rending little film unless you don’t mind never being the same again.

~ by Garry on October 28, 2007.