Reviewing in typically self-indulgent style

Last night, the boyfriend and I watched Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming. We moved the TV into the bedroom, so for the first time since we've been in CA we were both able to stretch out comfortably. Movie watching on the little red toy couch had devolved into cramped, tangled affair, with me absurdly complaining of arthritic knees and the boyfriend constantly shifting his torso accompanied by exaggerated expressions of pain. Add to this two cats who insist on clinging to stationary human body parts against all attempts to detach them. We were a severely disgruntled pile of limbs and fur.

Movie watching on the bed, in contrast, is luxurious. Even the cats seem happier.

Kicking and Screaming, if it's not obvious, was my Netflix choice. The bf prefers obscure foreign documentaries on depressing subjects or Sam Peckinpah westerns. I, on the other hand, am drawn to flimsy, self-conscious indie flicks the way I'm drawn to Vintage paperbacks. It's a kind of shallow solipsism that I'm certainly not proud of, but what can I do? We all have our guilty pleasures.

Very briefly: The film was made in 1995. It involves a group of (male) friends who've just graduated from college and are having a difficult time making the transition to the post-college world. In the first scene we learn that the main character, Grover, was looking forward to moving to Brooklyn with his girlfriend, but she's unexpectedly landed some kind of writing fellowship in Prague and plans to abandon him for a European adventure. The nerdy-neurotic/sexual escapades of the friends and their witty verbal exchanges are intersperced with flashbacks to the couple's senior-year courtship, now sadly cut off. The guys lope through the next 12 months, still living together near campus, still immersed in the cycle and structure of the academic year, repeatedly attempting to extricate themselves and eek out new identites and repeatedly failing. Or almost failing. On the whole, the film was mildly funny, a tad too long, and otherwise pretty innocuous and enjoyable.

Still. It took me back.

I graduated from college in (gasp. choke.) 1996. I took off for my own European adventure not long afterwards, and returned close to Thanskgiving, full of culture and grand ideas and perfectly primed to make an emotional mess of my romantic life. Which I did, stunningly. I didn't so much lope through that first year out as I barrelled, like a woefully misguided freight train. A curiously malleable and lightweight freight train. A freight train who spent most of the time with her head in a book or sleeping with the wrong person. Possibly on occasion doing both at the same time.

Honestly, the uncanny thing about the movie, perhaps the thing that brought that post-college year back so vividly, is how Grover keeps telling everyone that his ex-girlfriend is in Czechoslovakia so that his father finally has to inform him that actually it's the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic and Slovakia. Two separate countries. I'd done exactly the same thing when I was telling people about my upcoming trip, describing how I'd be going from France to Hungary and then to Czechoslovakia. Until a brand new friend corrected me, in an abrubt way that made me laugh. It was perhaps one of the first things he said to me and I was just slightly taken aback. But I liked that, to him, precision mattered. It mattered to me too.

And then, in the end, I didn't make it to the Czech Republic after all. I got terribly homesick in Budapest, started running low on cash, and after repeatedly annoying the intimidating Hungarian ticket agent by buying and returning a ticket back to the States, twice, I finally got on a plane and flew home. To get a job and mess up my life a little. The Czech Republic and I... it simply wasn't our time, I suppose. Kind of like Grover's spontaneous and grand attempt to talk his way onto a flight to Prague at the end of the film, only to realize he doesn't have his passport. Just not meant to work out.

***************

And yet, Czech Republic, you've remained near to my heart over all these years. It's more than a little mysterious, really. This steadfastness. Despite our distance now, at times I feel so incredibly close it unnerves me. I long for you with abandon.