The End of the Affair with Vanessa

So yesterday I saw The End of the Affair with my family, and although I consider it a good movie, it is, like just about all Graham Greene, somewhat depressing (its basically about the end of an affair with lots of religion and guilt thrown in). Anyway, amid my Graham Greene induced melancholy, it occured to me that Graham Greene has a really good movie record, as several of his books have been made into really good movies, most notably perhaps, my favorite movie of all, The Third Man for which he wrote the screenplay (which he later turned into a book). So thats my movie recommendation(s) for the week.

Today I saw the LA Opera's production of Samuel Barber's Vanessa. My dad decided that the unnamed cold, bleak country where it is set, is either Latvia or Estonia, so heres to you Luukas (I still remember your name, and I also know that you are from Estonia, and I also think I spelled your name correctly from memory). So Vanessa gets ditched by her fiance and she sits in a snowed in house for twenty years, Ms. Havisham style, with all the portraits and mirrors covered and perpetually planning a dinner for when her man will return. Then the son of her former lover comes back, impregnates her niece (Erika), marries her (Vanessa), and takes her to Paris, leaving Erika to get depressed in the freezing climate all by herself, just like she had done twenty years earlier. I don't think its supposed to be very happy. Oh yeah, Vanessa also has a mother who hasn't spoken to her in the last twenty years and who by the end of the opera won't speak to the now secluded Erika either. It was nice however that the old mother was played by Rosalind Elias who sang Erika in the world premier of the opera in 1958. Needless to say, she really was old, but luckily since she liked giving everyone the silent treatment/cold shoulder, she had very little to say in the opera. All the characters in the opera were a bit perplexing but overall the opera was really solid. And my dad had never seen the opera, which doesn't happen with very many of them, so none of us knew what to expect. Alright, I think my ranting is about done.

There was this really cool quintet late in the opera which was about love, and since I love all of you, I thought I'd pass it on (the singing happened to be really clear throughout, so the English text was easy to understand):

"To leave, to break;
to find, to keep;
to stay, to wait;
to hope, to dream;
to weep and remember;
to love is all of this -- and none of it is love."
(VANESSA, IV-2)