The Woman in a Chair

Yes, I know...a chair theme. That was the unexpected theme of my day.

About an hour ago I was watching Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts in Notting Hill on cable. While I love this movie dearly and always get those tingly, fuzzy feelings in my tummy when I watch it, a new kind of feeling took over me this time around. I hadn't seen this movie for a few years and so when I watched it tonight, I couldn't help but tear up towards the end of the film. See that usually happens when Roberts starts her "I'm just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her" speech to Grant, but, oddly enough, I found myself greatly touched by another couple in the movie- Max and Bella.

Grant's character William's best friend is Max, who has a paraplegic wife named Bella. It isn't the fact that she is paraplegic that moved me, it was the love these two characters shared. After William has turned down Roberts' Anna, even after her romantic overture, his friends make him realise he has made a terrible mistake and rally to go in search of Anna on her last day in London. Max brings his car around and the whole gang squashes inside to go along for the adventure- except for Bella.


Obviously not wanting to slow the search party down, Bella quietly stays behind. Before driving off, Max asks, "where's Bella?" And after seeing that she's stayed behind, Max scoffs at the idea and gets out, picking up his disabled wife and placing her in the passenger seat next to him, with Rhys Ifans' Spike thus shuffled into the the boot of the station wagon.

Now that might not have been a terrible exciting moment in the movie, but lo and behold, I sat there with tears falling down my face watching this subtle, yet beautiful moment between these two characters. I know this movie is about Roberts and Grant, but for me, it was all about Tim McInnerny's Max and Gina McKee's Bella.

The gesture, the love, the devotion, the commitment displayed by this couple in this unassuming fleeting moment completely captured me. It really struck a chord in me that I suppose I only now realised because I myself am in love. Being in love seems to make every romantic, poignant, or even sad, moment in films multiply in their intensity.

The last time I watched this movie so many moons ago as a high schooler, I had never felt intense love before. Now that I have, I feel these beautifully crafted movie moments even more overpoweringly than ever before. I used to say that movies and television would never make me cry, but ever since I found love in my life, I've been crying left, right and centre.

But I'm not complaining. It's a wonderful feeling. Truly wonderful.