Though it was last week when we watched that film, I still see that man’s eyes staring into the faces of those who’ve been forgotten.  Not just that young girl’s face, who hadn’t lived long enough to know which memory to choose, but the faces of the rest of the council too, like somehow that guy had seen when the old man cheated at checkers using, ‘the oldest trick in the book’ or saw how the outside of the memory bank looked like the park that has been the source of bittersweet recollection for so many people.  I wonder if somehow it is the same park they all remember, and if it’s winter there because the workers are all ghosts, and ghosts seem to make places cold.  So maybe when the old man goes to the park to be with his wife, and she has gone there to be with that young soldier, and the soldier goes to the idea of the park with his death-made friends, if they’re all seasons of the same park, seasons of time as it passes for that space, and not just the people.

Maybe places can’t remember because they’re inanimate, but as Modiano expressed in his book, and what this film seems to say to me, is that places are impressed on by people and by their sense of time and memory.

Maybe the guy in charge of the moon in that place is the man on the moon…That’s just silly romanticizing, but it is pretty to imagine.  This reminds me of a fantasy trilogy at the end of which these two kids fell in love, but couldn’t exist in the same world.  They lived the rest of their lives in parallel universes but once a year visited the same park at the same time on the same bench (or maybe it was under a tree).  How do they remember each other? Do they imagine the other as they’d age? I wonder if that soldier guy gets to sit and think forever now and if that’s good or bad.  No birds, no wind, no music, just the silent staring and remembering….