A lifetime in a few minutes.
As I approach 40 years of age, just a few months away now, I don’t yet seem to have any of the panic or regret that tends to be associated with such major birthdays, though I do have one issue: when I look into the mirror, I don’t see a 40-year-old. Sure, I see a guy with a few wrinkles around the eyes and on the brow, and yeah, the chin of my beard will soon be gray instead of brown, but when I look (lovingly) into my own eyes, I still see the same little kid who used to read comic books under the bedsheets, I still see the same teenager who clung to his Nirvana catalogue like it was scripture, I still see the same young man with an ill-advised ponytail stumbling into adulthood, and I still see the 30-year-old cleaning up that last kid’s mistakes and forging ahead. Despite what time, my skin, or my beard tell me, I am the same person I’ve always been, but I’m a brand-new person everyday as well, built of the decisions I make and the successes and failures I endure. I’m a river, like everybody else: never the same in the same place twice.
Life moves fast, it’s true, but it also moves incredibly slow, so slow that one day you look into the mirror and there’s a stranger you recognize staring back at you, an old man with a little boy’s eyes, an adult who appeared by such minor increments it’s like you snuck up on yourself. This nostalgic, almost paranoid feeling is at the heart of today’s short film selection, Le Miror, from the filmmaking team of Antoine Tinguely and Laurent Fauchère, collectively known as RAMON AND PEDRO. In the span of just a handful of minutes, we watch a little boy grow into an old man via a series of a super-brief vignettes in front of the mirror. Childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, partnership, parenthood, regret, success, happiness, sorrow, middle-age, and the man’s golden years are all covered in the blink of an eye, a testament to both how quickly life moves and how slowly we live it. Funny, sincere, revelatory, and honest, Le Miror is a cautionary tale and a song of triumph at the same time, a lot like life.
Related Topics: Short Films
