I have a confession: I watched Eat, Pray, Love the other day. And it really got under my skin.
I’d like to say it just happened, that I stumbled across it on TV late at night and wasn’t fully aware of what I was doing. This would be a lie. It was a conscious choice and I take responsibility for those three hours of my life I will never get back.
In my defence I am trying to get over someone, and not the kind of person that my friends can fairly rail at or call an asshole. Throwing darts at his picture or making a voodoo doll seem inappropriate reactions to our situation as he is wonderful and funny, and we are still on good terms. So it became clear to me one dark, dark evening that I was either going to have to find more distractions or just embrace the very strong probability that my near-future would include a lot of not very dignified drunk texting.*
So Eat, Pray, Love seemed, at some point in time, a good idea. I like food. I could probably do with more spirituality in my life. And we all need love, don’t we?
If I’m honest, given that my expectations were very low, this film is not quite as awful as I had feared it would be. That is, if you can suspend your disbelief enough to not throw a cushion at Julia Roberts as she delivers her homily One Must Not Conform To Social Norms of Weight and Beauty, while shakily raising a waif-like arm to eat her slice of pizza. Or if you can curb your eye rolling during the many, many scenes of her sitting alone looking meditative/pensive/reflective/serene/troubled, as the camera pans out to show her bathed in golden light, becoming one with the beautiful landscape she is inhabiting, just as she is becoming one with the universe. She is growing as a person, don’t you know.
I think what actually really irks me about this film is that there are aspects of it that I do see some truth in. It is important to go outside of your comfort zone to learn more about who you are. We should all be striving for some balance in our lives in order to accept the different, sometimes contradictory, facets of our characters. Yes, I would like to go to Bali please. And attain enlightenment. And have pasta and wine for lunch every day.
But where I feel the whole story could have been so much braver is by actually following through with the point that it tries to hammer into our heads at every possible opportunity. Julia Roberts doesn’t need a man. No, she really doesn’t. Cute Italian teacher shows interest but she’s not biting. Indian arranged marriage prompts bittersweet recollections of her own wedding but she remains strong. Look, there’s a man – but she doesn’t need him. Even though he’s charming, and takes care of her, and is in touch with his feelings, and willing to face his fear of being hurt again just for her. She doesn’t need him, really she doesn’t. Oh wait, wait, hold it just one minute – ok, they’re walking off into the sunset together. You were saying?
How much more interesting if, instead of presenting Javier Bardem as her prize for good behaviour learning to love herself, she just got to go off and keep enjoying her life for a while, entirely on her own terms. Kept exploring, kept having adventures, kept gorging on pizza. What if that was the happy ending, full stop?
My own life is of course a lot more prosaic than that of fictitious-characters-loosely-based-on-real-people-and-played-by-Julia-Roberts. My radical steps to getting over someone include making a series of life choices, ranging from the sublime (resurrect ailing writing career, spend time with people I love) to the patently ridiculous (hang fairy lights on the dead trees on my balcony to convince myself I am not an utter failure, incapable of nurturing life or sustaining any form of relationship, and destined to die alone and be eaten by urbanised foxes).
Because I’m all about looking at the positive at the moment (clearly) I can say two good things have come from watching this film. Firstly it led me to Peter Bradshaw’s review of it in the Guardian which, honestly, brings joy to my soul. Secondly, and less misanthropically, it has prompted me to think a bit more about how to broaden my own horizons in the city I have been living in for six years. Little ways in which I could do a bit more and learn a bit more. How to find myself, without necessarily travelling to an ashram in India.
And so I found myself yesterday (haha, see what I did there?) at a grimy club in Downtown Cairo, a place that sometimes holds nights for guest DJs to play an assortment of music designed to get the blood (and beer) flowing. Cairo being the smallest enormous city you will ever come across in terms of regularly running into people you know, I found myself sandwiched between friends and acquaintances. Surrounded by the ghosts of bad dating choices of old, I had the closest experience to an epiphany that I have had in a very long time.
Quite simply I realised that, dripping with sweat and in the middle of some very dodgy dance moves, I was having a great time and everything else could take care of itself later. It was both as mundane and as profound as that.
There was no meditation, no Italian wine and no Javier Bardem; but there was beer, an assortment of hilarious people and plenty of shameless gyrating.
And it was bloody brilliant.
*Ok, there has also been drunk texting, but I could not have predicted that when I made this particular decision.
