“Want to have a contest?”
“Sure. You go first.”
“ Il Postino with Massimo Troisi and Philippe Noiret.”
“Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful. My favorite scene is the one that echoes Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. ”
“If we’re talking about Chaplin, then City Lights. ”
“Beau Geste.”
“With Gary Cooper?”
“Yes.”
“You’re right. It’s the classic melodrama.”
“Now it’s your turn.”
“ Chariots of Fire. My favorite scene is when the trainer, Mussabini, can’t bring himself to go to the stadium. He looks out his hotel window, sees the Union Jack going up the flagpole, and realizes that Abrahams has won. He starts crying with joy and punches his fist through his straw hat.”
“ Million Dollar Baby. Clint Eastwood is a genius. Plus, he’s definitely my type.”
“ Braveheart with Mel Gibson. The execution scene. He’s on the scaffold, and he yells ‘Freedom!’ while the executioner stands by with his axe at the ready. Just a few seconds before he’s executed, he sees the woman he loves moving through the crowd. She looks at him from a distance and smiles at him, and he smiles back, just as the axe is falling.”
“Ghost.”
“Gladiator.”
“The Green Mile.”
“Schindler’s List.”
“You’re rolling out the big guns. The Way We Were, the whole movie, especially the final scene, and the soundtrack.”
“ Cinema Paradiso. The scene with the reel of censored kisses.”
“It’s true, it’s wonderful. I think that movie won an Oscar for that scene alone. It’s just the kind of thing Americans go crazy over. What about the final scene of Thelma and Louise?”
“Spectacular. There’s a line in that movie that I’ve always dreamed of getting a chance to say, someday.”
“What line?”
“Harvey Keitel is questioning Brad Pitt, and to get him to talk, he says: ‘Son, your misery is gonna be my goddamn mission in life.’ Now that’s the way you threaten someone.”
“It’s your turn.”
“ Jesus Christ Superstar. Mary Magdalene singing by Jesus’ tent while he’s sleeping.”
“ ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him.’ ” As she said the title of the song sung by Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who was in love with Jesus Christ, I realized I’d said the wrong thing.
She didn’t notice. Or rather, she noticed so openly that it didn’t matter.
“As you can imagine, I really identify with that scene.”
At that point, inevitably, there was a pause.
“Okay, fine, I identified with Mary Magdalene. What about you?” Nadia said at last.
“I actually identified with both of the protagonists of Philadelphia, Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks.”
“My God, that final sequence with the Super 8 home movies of Tom Hanks’s character, Andrew, as a child! I remember it as if I were watching the movie right now. The swing, the children playing on the beach, the mother dressed in those sixties clothes with a scarf on her head, the dog, Andrew dressed as a cowboy… the music by Neil Young. It’s so heartbreaking.”
“The final scene is the most moving one, but my favorite is during the trial, when Denzel Washington does that direct examination of Tom Hanks.”
“Why is that your favorite scene?”
“If you like, I can recite it for you, and then you’ll see why.”
“Recite it for me? You know the whole scene by heart?”
“More or less.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You remember the story, of course?”
She looked at me as if she were a Grand Slam tennis champion and I’d just asked whether she remembered how to hit a backhand. I raised both hands in a sign of surrender.
“Okay, okay, forgive me. So it’s a crucial point in the trial, and Denzel Washington is questioning Tom Hanks, who plays a lawyer named Andrew. He’s in the advanced stages of the disease and he doesn’t have long to live:
“Are you a good lawyer, Andrew?
“I’m an excellent lawyer.
“What makes you an excellent lawyer?
“I love the law. I know the law. I excel at practicing.
“What do you love about the law, Andrew?
“I… many things. What do I love the most about the law?
“Yes.
“It’s that every now and again, not often, but occasionally, you get to be a part of justice being done. That really is quite a thrill when that happens.
“Thank you, Andrew.”
After a few instants of breathless silence, Nadia started clapping slowly.
I hadn’t played that game in a long time. Years and years ago, I’d had a strange facility for repeating from memory the words of movies, songs, books, and poems. Then, for a number of reasons, I began to find it increasingly difficult.
There is nothing that evokes the disquieting idea of the passage of time as much as observing the deterioration of an ability that you had always taken for granted. It’s more or less the same thing that happens in the gym. You’re sparring with someone and you see-to give an example-that he’s leading with a straight right punch. You know exactly what you need to do in this case: duck, feint, straighten up, and hit back, all in a single, fluid movement. Your brain issues the order to your back and your arms, but the order arrives just a fraction of a second too late, the punch hits you, and your counter-attack is slow-it seems to you-and slightly off-kilter. It’s not a reassuring sensation.
The fact that the words of the movie came back to me that night so easily, so clearly, made me feel good. As if I’d returned to something fundamental about myself.
“How do you do it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve always had a gift for learning and reciting things that I liked-and I really liked that exchange-but recently I thought that I’d lost that ability. I’m as amazed as you are that I was able to pull it off. Though, of course, it might be more impressive if we checked the actual words of the movie to find out if I got it right.”
She looked at me, and it seemed as if she were searching for the right words. Or the right question.
“Do you like it so much because you see yourself in it?”
“I think so. It’s not something I talk about much. I became a lawyer pretty much by accident. I always thought of this work as something I settled for. I was a little ashamed of it. And it’s always been hard for me to admit-to myself, much less to others-how much I’ve ended up liking it.”
She flashed me a beautiful smile, the kind that tells you the other person really is listening to what you’re saying. She didn’t speak; she didn’t need to. She was telling me to go on.
“The truth is that I’ve always looked upon my work with an element of condescension. In college I enrolled in law because I didn’t know what else to do. I’ve always had an ideological and stereotypical vision of the work that lawyers do, and I’ve almost always denied myself the right to be proud of being one. I never had the moral courage to revise my slightly childish idea of practicing law being an ethically unacceptable profession. The work of shysters and hair-splitters.”
“Isn’t that true, though? I’ve never had a good experience with any lawyer except you.”
“Sure, it’s often true. The profession is full of scoundrels, shysters, virtual illiterates, and even a few genuine criminals. For that matter, the same is true of the magistrate, or any other profession you care to name. The issue, though, isn’t whether there are bad or incompetent people practicing law, or whether the work tends to exaggerate some of the worst qualities of the human mind, and of human beings in general.”
“So what is the issue?”
“The issue is that this is a profession in which you can be a free man. It’s a line of work that can offer you certain things… well, I don’t think there are many things in life that rank with the feeling of winning an acquittal for a defendant you know is innocent, especially when he was facing hard time or even life in prison.”
“But I wasn’t innocent,” Nadia said with a smile.
True. Technically, she hadn’t been innocent. She had committed the crime of abetting prostitution, that is, she had introduced pretty girls to wealthy men and had received a substantial fee for her intermediation. No one had been forced into it; no one had been blackmailed; no one had been hurt. The idea that we send people to prison-that we deprive people of their freedom-for actions of this sort becomes increasingly inconceivable to me the more time passes.