A while back I wrote about the Wim Wenders movie, Perfect Days. I still think about it all the time. So when I was asked if I’d be interested in previewing a film titled Young Ali:Those Were the Days directed by Amir Motlagh and cowritten by Charles Borg, I wondered how the poetic elements would hit.

I like to think things through by thinking about other things along with. So what follows is me thinking about the film in conjunction with the poetic connections my brain made while watching. First though, here is the trailer.

You can check out the update on a release date here. And see some of the awards the film has won here.

We first glimpse Ali in a car in a garage that we later learn is at his parents’ house. Then we see him setting up a blanket in a dark backyard, the moon playing through his hands, as though it were a coin in a magician’s hands. We’re told that this takes place six months after the world shut down due to Covid. So we know what that feels like, but it doesn’t pervade the narrative. Or, it does but with a quiet subtlety.

As you know I’m interested in conversations and spent a lot of time mulling about them in my book, Everything Affects Everyone. And you also might remember that I’ve long loved the conversation between Paul Auster with Edmond Jabès in Auster’s The Art of Hunger. Jabès says at one point, “when two people talk, one of them must always remain silent.” He goes on, “Now, during this silence that you impose on yourself, you are all the while forming questions and answers in your mind, since you can’t keep interrupting me. And as I continue to speak, you are eliminating questions from your mind…” The conversations in Young Ali are one-sided — Ali has earbuds on while talking to his wife from whom he has separated. He talks to his therapist on Zoom, again with earbuds on. The silence is doubled for the viewer, and so the questions we are forming, are not the same ones that Ali might be forming. What happened to communication during the pandemic? How do we get our feelings across now? our dreams? How do we say how we feel in the wreckage of it all? These are some of the questions the film turns over, flipping and reversing, much like a coin in our fingers, too.

The garage scenes feel womb-like, perhaps. There is a lot of going to sleep. A lot of water — automatic sprinklers wake him from his outdoor moon-bathed slumbers. After watching the film, I took out a favourite book by Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life (Lowe and Fitz tr), and turned to where she is talking about the full moon. “There’s a full moon tonight…..the moonlight is awkward.” And, “I had decided that I was going to go to sleep so I could dream…I was yearning for the novelty of dreams.” Later in the same book Lispector talks about caves, how, “in this darkness the flowers grow entangled in an enchanted and moist garden.” And “then comes dawn with its paunch full of thousands of tiny, clamouring birds. And each thing that happens to me I live here, taking note of it. Because I want to feel in my inquiring hands the living and trembling nerve of what is today.”

Ali, sleeping in his parents’ garden, amid the orange trees, and along with a fancy white rabbit, going in and out of his garage-cave, driving, riding his bike — he takes us on a poetic journey without really going too far physically. A transformation occurs, much as it did for all of us during the pandemic. We changed more than we thought we did and somewhat against our own will, often.

Well, Ali has anger issues. Losses accumulate. He returns in his mind to childhood, as we often do back in our parental abodes. But he’s working on it all. He’s working on it. The moon slips through his fingers. Of course it does. Still, there’s a white rabbit — which is thought to be a symbol of good luck, new beginnings, and inspiration.

There is a book I love by Václav Cílek titled, To Breathe with Birds: a Book of Landscapes. In it the author says that “in order to be able to have the right feelings in our souls, we need physical contact with objects and places.” I felt that one of the questions that Young Ali asks is, “How do we get back to having the right feelings in our souls?”

I was compelled to take another well-loved book of poetry off my shelf while thinking about this film, and that is the superb I Love Artists by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. In her poem “Fog,” she says this:

“She can describe for you the phenomenon of feeling her way through the fog. For whom does she describe this?

What ignorance can her description eliminate?

Which person is supposed to understand her description, people who have been lost in fog before, or people who have lived on the desert and never seen what she would describe?

You try to connect the experience of being lost with something external or physical, but we are really connecting what is experienced with what is experienced.”

I think a lot of that early pandemic time felt like being lost in a fog. And later, you want to describe the fog of that time to people who will come later, or who experienced another version of it in a different part of the world. Ali’s experience is described with specificity and with an eye to the every day-ness of it. Marriages collapsed, people moved home, anger erupted, people worked things out with online therapy, at times medication, at times feeling the earth hard below our bodies as we attempted to ground ourselves.

Is the film trying to describe this singular time to others who had been lost in the fog or to those who were not lost in the fog? Both, I think. And isn’t that a feat? Young Ali is poetic and real, the eponymous character living and trembling as we all did, under that same old, silly old storybook moon.

Photo note: taken by me, as usual — Rome, November 2023. The oranges, small moons, small orbs of light and hope.

Lastly, thanks to Charles Borg for the invitation and opportunity to preview this film.

August 5, 2024