A Film To Remember

“I'll always remember. It was late afternoon.

It lasted forever. And ended too soon.”

These lyrics from Mandy Moore’s “Cry”, which incidentally also happen to be one of the soundtracks of the subject of this post, aptly sum up my experience of watching, what I now consider as, one of the best romantic movies ever made.

It was a late Sunday afternoon when I, urged by the desire to ward off boredom and more strongly, that of freeing up space on my packed-to-the brim hard disk, decided to watch “A Walk to Remember” – a movie about which I had heard good reviews from a lot of my friends but could never bring myself to plunging into the torturous experience of a romantic flick. And so I double-clicked the icon, opened a Firefox window and typed www.cricinfo.com

The media player window remained minimized for about 15 minutes or so. It was then that I heard the dialogue – “So would it kill you to try?” , “Yep, and I'm too young to die.” And my attention shifted momentarily to the canniness of the rhyme. I hypothesized – this one might have good dialogues at least. And though I'm too young to die, I took the risk of giving it a try. To provide crutches to my poor comprehension of spoken American English, I downloaded the subtitles and decided to give the movie some respect. Full Screen view it was.

And one and a half hours later, I was left dumbstruck. Here was a movie that had hit me in some measure – the first one to do so after “The Dark Knight”.

With no big stars, no state-of-the-art special effects, no riveting thrills, no high-adrenalin action and absolutely no panache at all, the movie captures you with its sheer simplicity and neatness of emotion. Poignant themes of sacrifice, optimism, believing in your dreams and Faith, built on heart-warming and truly credible performances make it one of the smoothest watches ever. You feel as if you are one of the students of the California high school, watching the story unroll before your eyes from a stone’s throw distance. It’s the after-taste that differentiates a good meal and a good film from a great one. And true to its greatness, the film’s end leaves you longing but not unsatisfied.

Most romantic movie fans would consider “A Walk to Remember” as a romantic film. And with all due respect to them, I consider it more a film about Faith than anything else. For me, these two dialogues that underline the movie, say it all:

Landon (to Reverend Sullivan): “I'm just asking you for the same thing that you teach us every day in Church. And that's faith.”

Landon: I'm sorry she never got her miracle.
Reverend Sullivan: She did. It was you.

Though “Titanic” still remains as my gold standard in romantic films (most of which I hate), “A Walk to Remember” shall henceforth hold a special place of its own.

Though I’m inclined to, I wouldn’t blabber anymore and play the spoilsport for those who might not have seen the film. But if you haven’t, you should. And don’t open Cricinfo along with it. Have Faith in the movie. :)