Nicci: As my mother - 80 years old, registered blind, arthritic, disabled, eighteen in her heart and a young girl in her hopes and fears - often tells me: you have to be strong to be old.
We've just watched Mid-August Lunch, Gianni di Gregorio's adorable, respectful, generous-hearted homage to old people, in which (as well as being writer and director) he plays the part of a man in his late fifties, out of work because looking after his ninety-year-old mother, strapped for cash, run off his feet, a bit melancholy but cheerful and without a whiff of self-pity. The film takes place over 24 hours during which Gianni allows himself to be persuaded to take in three other old women in their late eighties and nineties for the August holiday. He drinks, cooks, smokes, makes up beds and at night goes from room to room to watch them sleeping, like a tender mother.
These weren't actresses pretending to be old; they were old women whom di Gregorio had cajoled into playing the part of themselves. They really were in their nineties. The camera settled on their wrinkles, sags, liver spots. And it was almost shocking to spend 75 minutes in their wonderful company, because we are so unused to doing so. We gaze at the young and turn away from the old. We don't see them - it's the next civil rights movement.
There was a moment I found particularly poignant, when one of the women, lying in bed, talks to the exhausted Gianni (who's trying to get her to go to sleep) about her memories of being a child - about looking after her own grandmother. A very old woman remembering being young and watching over a very old woman. We contain all the ages we have ever been: young, old and in-between.
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