Sunday Movies at the Upper Moreland Library - Poem: The Last Movie

Here's our Movie Man - Maurizio Giammarco, PhD

He selects terrific foreign films for us to watch and always brings in cookies from an Italian bakery.

Sunday was the last movie for this season. I always attend the films unless I'm in the hospital for complications of my kidney transplant.

What makes these Sunday movies so compelling? Like most complex questions, there's not a single answer.

We watched Lorna's Silence by the Belgian filmmakers, the Dardenne brothers. Few Americans have heard of them.

I also checked out another Dardenne film, The Son, which was an amazing film, that like Lorna, was intensely suspenseful.

The Son was made specifically for the actor Olivier Gourmet.



Here's Olivier with the man that murdered his son. What a film! Sparse dialogue, as in all the Dardenne films, according to Maurizio. One Z please.



THE LAST MOVIE

Two o’clock on Sundays
a time I reserve for you
o Maurizio of the difficult pronunciation
Maurizio Maurizio
not one of your popular baby names like
Ethan, Jason or Jaidan.

You have survived the difficult name your parents gave you
and grown to look the way Maurizio ought
debonair, if they use that word anymore,
turtlenecked and jacketed with wisps of red hair
that, when young, made you the beloved of your family
and to your library audience
men and women past their prime
avoiding dotage with supplements and puzzles

You, a maker of films we’ve never seen,
are a keen observer as you teach at the front of the room
"Ah, there’s Christ imagery!"
"Ah, erotic imagery!"
I must look harder next time,
and the music, “if you will,” your favorite phrase, a simple
Beethoven sonata at the end of “Lorna’s Silence”
by the Brothers Dardenne

Your thick stapled handouts bring tears to my eyes
as I toss them, half-read, in my junk mail carton.
“Take two,” you say, “as you pass out cookies from your favorite bakery”
I confess that during Lorna’s Silence, where we are trapped in narrow spaces,
with ruthless people who make us squirm
I wish to comfort myself with more chocolate cannoli and that fat crumbly cookie
with morsels of goodness inside

The Sunday movies will be gone until January.
How can I live in these darkest months without you?
A chocolate cannoli perhaps on the third Sunday at two?