Theory and capture of the peak scene

The idea of ​​finding your favorite scene in a movie is a pleasant exercise that doesn't require much training or effort; all you need is what's in your memory and the right to choose. Naturally, that favorite scene or moment in a movie doesn't (in fact, it doesn't usually) necessarily coincide with that movie's greatest climactic scene . It's simply "my moment," the instant that connected me to that movie, perhaps forever, and the one that will first come to mind whenever I think of it.

Another distinct, though closely related, sport is reflection, searching, and extracting, as if it were a pearl in the cloister of an oyster, the key scene of a film, the one that contains its soul and into which the screenwriter, director, technicians, and actors have poured all their talent. It's not easy to find that key, supreme, lifelong moment, and even less so in great works full of great sequences, unforgettable situations and phrases, and unrepeatable moments. Films that are a Himalaya of moments, and in them you have to perceive what their Everest is. You know, titles like 'Casablanca,' 'Citizen Kane,' 'The Quiet Man,' 'Manhattan,' 'To Have and Have Not,' 'Placido' …

It's not easy, indeed, but even less so is finding 'it' in one's own life. Anyone who dedicates a few minutes or hours to identifying the peak moment of their life, the key moment in their journey, will probably be left bewildered amid a magma of memories and feelings, in which successes, nostalgia, blessed or cursed chances, and some date with its own heartbeat all contend. We all know what's important in our lives, just as we know how important 'Citizen Kane' or 'In a Lonely Place,' Nicholas Ray's masterpiece, are, but who is capable of picking up a pin and catching a periwinkle?

From life itself, I recognize the happy impossibility of getting anything less than a good handful of periwinkles, but from 'In a Lonely Place' I do capture the culminating moment, the instant that appears to me as I'm saying the title of the film, and it is that magical second, that mysterious crossing where Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Graham meet in the Spanish courtyard where they have their apartments; they don't know each other, they barely stop and notice each other, they only notice each other... but that is the soul of the story.

And you can sharpen your tweezers even further to extract the great moment not from one film but from an entire filmography, that of a filmmaker as complex and subtle as Kieslowski, whose work is naturally another Himalayan. In two brief moments, in his "Decalogue 2" and "Blue," you find the seed of his cinema in your heart.

The 'Decalogue 2' deals, like all his work, with a great moral dilemma: a man awaits death in a hospital bed. His wife is pregnant by another man she (also) loves, and she asks the doctor for some certainty about whether or not her husband will die, because if he doesn't, she'll be giving up on having the child she's expecting. Everything is explained with enormous subtlety and feeling, and the doctor assures her that nothing can be done about this already widespread cancer. The climactic, key scene takes place next to the dying man's bed, on whose bedside table there is a full glass and a spoon. Desperately clinging to this spoon is a fly trying with great effort to get out. It struggles, it struggles. Preisner's music seeps into your bones... How can you ever forget what Kieslowski instills in you about taking Science in vain or about the Second Commandment?

In 'Blue' it is a moment of skin, the ray of sunlight that plays on the face of Juliette Binoche, an empty woman after the accidental death of her husband and son, the serene flute once again (always) of Preisner and the almost pleasurable sensation that there is still one more day to live.

And almost as complicated as capturing that 'Rosebud moment' from a life is choosing it in a work as enormous as that of Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, in which everything is ocean and everything is shore. But there is an overwhelming idea that contains within itself another majestic idea that also contains within it the simple outline of the nobility of time and its passing. It is in 'Late Spring' , in which a young woman (Setsuko Hara) cares for her widowed father (Chishu Ryu), and hesitates between attending to his need for marriage or continuing life with her elderly father, who encourages her to get married and start her own family; She gives him loving reasons to stay with him, and he presents her with calm arguments to the contrary... and adds the damp lie that he also intends to get married, and the ending, pure Ozu, warm, low-altitude and bitter, picks him up on his return to the solitude of the house, sitting in a hammock with an apple that he slowly peels while a gentle wave beats on the shore that awaits him.

The climactic moment between father and son in 'Call Me by Your Name', the three or four reasons that the mature writer Blas Otamendi gives his young love to dispel the problems of their relationship in 'Historia de un beso', or the impressive, overwhelming scene of the little girl Sofía Otero caring for and being cared for by her mother in 'Cuatro Paredes', by Ibon Cormezana and soon to be released, are also a paradigm among thousands of those moments with which cinema trains you to find the pearl, or the periwinkle, of yourself and your circumstances.