Perfect Sense

Years ago, I fell in love with a movie called Perfect Sense. In the movie, a chef and a scientist are falling in love…just as an unexplained illness is sweeping through the world that robs people of each of their senses.
A pandemic that no one quite understands.
A pandemic that appears suddenly and moves swiftly.
There are scenes in movie with empty streets, empty restaurants, people wearing masks, saturated media coverage…something that felt too familiar as I rewatched the movie yesterday for the first time in a while.
Many of the scenes were replicas of what I saw on walks and the TV since March during this time in quarantine.

I love the slow pace of the movie, the way the characters are taking time to know each other in an urgent world, the lines about how simple the world can be when we are all experiencing the same thing at the same time, how humans learned to connect and communicate when senses they long depended on were no longer a part of their lives…
And I certainly found myself wishing there had been a similar solidarity on even a national scale during this pandemic. The narrative is separated by photos and scenes of people all over the world, separated by land and language, but connected by their shared experience of this illness and an understanding of each other’s humanity.
Understanding each other’s humanity.

If only.