巴黎，我爱你

Just watched a cute and satisfying movie Paris Je'Taime, a collection of 18 5-minute shorts by an array of acclaimed directors from across the globe. It is an attempt to capture the mood of the city and perhaps allow a glimpse into the spectrum of human emotions (it is a hard thing to do in 5-min). There are some hits and misses (Chris Doyle's segment is definitely a miss).

The last segment, about an American tourist traversing the city alone and narrated by her in her heavily accented French, is almost transcendant. In a park, sitting alone on a bench in a park on a sunny day, eating a sandwich, and looking at the scope of human activities around her--something overcomes her and she says:

Sitting there, alone in a foreign country, far from my job and everyone I know, a feeling came over me. It was like remembering something I’d never known before or had always been waiting for, but I didn’t know what. Maybe it was something I’d forgotten or something I’ve been missing all my life. All I can say is that I felt, at the same time, joy and sadness, but not too much sadness because I felt alive. Yes, alive.