Seen in 240p, unrestored, subtitled only in Spanish, a language I don’t speak. Still five stars.

No love story has pained me this much in years. And yet it was so delicate, so bare, that I’m not sure it was a story of love. Hope, perhaps. Hesitation. A bit of self-deception, just like any good romance. The pain of seeing, for a moment, a half-ed dream lost to time, and the quiet disappointment at a future turned to ash. There was born a forgotten saint, foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats trembled off and whose loneliness remained.

There was a German sociologist, Kracauer, who wrote that memory and photography were natural opposites. That the edges of a memory fade, the details blur, the faces become indistinct, but the emotion at the heart of it remains. But a photograph steps out of time. The details of the image never change, but the person in it will; the setting of it will; and in time, it won’t be recognizable. 

From the moment it’s taken, it’s already growing old.

11.25.98 - 03.02.22

We eventually succumb to time, it's true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second ... We were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time.

That which we are, we are;

It's not as intelligent as it thinks it is. Insufferable.

Shabana became so vulnerable. After pleading with her husband for a new beginning, Pooja is turned down. We hold the camera on Kulbhushan Kharbanda, hold it for quite a while. And then I called cut; I saw Shabana crumbling to the ground, and falling to pieces.

Floored, and deeply moved, by Shabana Azmi's extraordinary acting as a woman picking up the pieces. A film unsparing but not unkind, a camera gentle enough just to sit with people in pain, and a performance so full of grace.