City Mooching and the Best Movie of the Year

It has been a lovely day.
After a leisurely breakfast ( Nu's hubby Jim missed out cos he had to jet off to Amsterdam for work) we caught the tube into town and suddenly became real tourists for an hour or two when we boarded one of the Thames clippers and took a trip from Embankment up to the London Dome and then back to Southwalk .
The weather was lovely.
At Southwalk we ambled around the cathedral then had a cracking seafood lunch at
The Wright Brothers Oyster Bar, which was filled to the gunnel's with suited and booted diners

We took our time over lunch, talked and laughed some more and then made our way to the Curzon Cinema in Mayfair where we indulged ourselves with probably the best film I have seen all year- the Argentinian movie The Secrets in their Eyes

Now Romantic movies have a tendency to leave me rather cold but The Secrets in their Eyes combines an absorbing and rather affecting generational love story with a well written and pacy crime thriller.

Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) is a retired criminal court Investigator, whose efforts to write a novel are frustrated when he finds himself unable to shake the memories of a 25 year old rape and murder case. After visiting his ex-supervisor (Soledad Villamil), who is now a judge, Benjamin decides to re investigate the case, and the audience is transported back and forth from his memories of the investigation to more recent twists and turns relating to it and in the course of this unravelling mystery Benjamin examines his own romantic history with Irene and his friendship with his drunken best friend and colleague Pablo ( a wise cracking Guillermo Francella)

Darin, with his hangdog charm and mature sexiness is wonderful in the lead role of Benjamin but his scenes with the sassy and luminous Villamil catapult this movie into something much more than your entertaining crime camper.

The couple's chemistry (portrayed over a twenty five year period) is at times terribly moving and their will-they-won't-they relationship literally reduced both Nuala and me to tears..... not a mean feat I can tell you!

Having said all this, there is much , much more to enjoy in this absolute cracker of a movie. The cinematography is superb ( a swooping tracking shot over a football stadium is just one particular standout) and the musical score by Federico Jusid re enforces the film's themes of loss,memory, fantasy and fiction.

Nuala loved the film as much as I did, and after a brief but thoroughly enjoyable narrative post mortem of what they did and why, I just had time to say my emotional goodbyes before I caught my train home.

It has been a lovely, lovely day.