In the mail, receiving a handwritten letter, opening it, reading it, the curvature of each character in the sender’s particular hand, and the non-urgency of the whole affair, the ample time to originate a response, yet the simple and quiet knowledge that you will, and that they know you will. This is what it might be to love.
It’s the wafting tempo of the 2021 Georgian film What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? directed by Alexandre Koberidze. Lisa and Giorgi bump into each other in the street in Kutaisi (one of the oldest cities in the world) several times, walk in the wrong direction, before deciding as they cross paths again on their respective ways home at the end of the day, that they like each other and should know each other. They plan a date. The next day, they each wake up looking like completely different people and faint. It’s a curse. New actors now play Giorgi and Lisa. Neither remembers how to do what she or he once loved—Lisa can’t understand her medical school notes and Giorgi is no longer a soccer player. They don’t know that the other person has also undergone such a change. How will they recognize each other? How will they recognize themselves? The rest of the film unfolds without the desperation of resolution—we barely hear Lisa or Giorgi speak. Instead, a narrator relates their thoughts and words. We spend plenty of time with the various residents of Kutaisi, who we don’t always receive formal introduction to. A duo recruits couples for their film on the subject. The film, both the diegetic one and What Do We See…?, is a series of impressions, of shared histories, incidents, and accidents. It is a love story in aggregate.
I am always relieved when I have been patient without effort. When time has passed and I have not worried about what I will find on the other side of it. When I can trust the air, the swaths of space I have to myself. I am grateful to receive a letter without having waited for it. To forget a plan with a friend before arriving in time. I’m happy to notice without agenda. To be curious with a sense of mischief.
It all takes an extraordinary life disguised in the mundane. And as present as you are, and as inherent as the earth is, you can’t make one alone. At unspecific and unexpected points, you will need extraordinary people.