The actress

"Je t'aime" is the first phrase we hear her say and for the rest of the movie she's restlessly wandering the streets of Paris, alone. Her face doesn't have any make up on and her lips curve down, fully, eternally forlorn. And after much silence in a few words she says what she fears the most: She won't age, because she'll go to sleep first. She disappears into the night, handsomely, like a boat. The image stays intact and 50 years later she hasn't aged, and the lonely trumpet that lulls her through a night in Paris reminds us of youth, in black and white and gray. In other circumstances, the actress has already died in the hands of tragedy. However, she never dies without having loved first, as if that satisfied the meaning of life, entirely. She quietly squirms and puts both fists near her chest because she knows she's a woman. She's bled, she's seen her hips grow and she's walked the streets at night in very high heels that have swollen her feet. And then after that, after she's smoked too many cigarettes and drank too many drinks, she wakes up in a different world, hangover, naked, and a letter rests beside her on her pillow. The handwriting of a man is impulsive, the letters are almost bolted onto the paper with violent strength and the ink splatters slightly from the stems of each "d" or each "y." In her thoughts, she talks without moving her lips and the coarse smoke laden voice reads the letter aloud in French. In it a fragment of a poem by Rilke, "From here there is no place that does not see you, you must change your life." Or I think that's what it said, the subtitles were white and overlapped on the pale close up of her face. She withdraws the letter and contemplates an empty landscape then she looks at me, in the dark, I look up and see the movement of the image travel through light from the film strip as it expands widely before me. Ladders of dust soar and cross through the the path of light with the sensuality of the smoke of a cigarette. The scene has changed in the meantime, and when I fix my eyes back on the screen, two hands are dipped in water, and off the water an image appears and becomes a photograph of herself in other times, when she was happy holding a man tightly. It ends, She ends.