Saint Etienne was for me a city you pass by quickly, either by car or by train, since the day I had arrived in Lyon for the first time. They have an excellent soccer team and a past in coal mining. Le Corbusier did some shenanigans in nearby Firminy. That's about it. When you take the train, right about Saint Etienne you always have a group of strange people entering and exiting. People tend to want to get out. But there comes a point where you want to participate in actual in-person culture. Sure, you could find the movies a friend and movie buff in Prague really really wants you to watch, online. Pull it up at home with a projector and potato chips. But home has a tendency to oppress over time. It is comfortable and save but to the extend it is an extension of your own mind, it also takes on similar shapes. Hazy, fickle, cyclical between expectation and disappointment and sometimes outright hostile. I for one have only recently discovered how wonderful it can be to laugh with a friend for 30 minutes in a coffee shop and hug her goodbye. How being recognized as a regular by a vegan bar owner makes you feel more human than all the thousands of books you might have crammed inside your head over the years. Outside people's minds coagulate to a spontaneous and messy, improvised scaffolding raised to paint, admire or renovate an infinite dimensional abstraction of the Sistine Chapel fresco. Then of course you realize, that human beings are very similar to cats who like sitting in very small boxes. A shoebox next to the heating in a room with your favorite humans, in a building with 3 other cats - it's good to know that you exist but stay out of my territory you son of a B . The Apartment building is in a small, beautiful town where life is great and that town is on a square whose angles sum to more than 360 degrees but that's about it. The next bigger agglomeration is Saint Etienne and if you want to see some new movies, it's slightly more likely that you can find a screening there. This year is very surprising to me. My girlfriend burned out like a new years rocket and returned from the sky of respectable employment like Ikarus and asteroids. I expected a geological extinction event and graveyard silence thereafter but what happened instead was a rise in energy and newfound curiosity about life. Saint Etienne is 1.5 hours from our place by car and in the past month we have been there 3 times because it was more fun to watch a movie in a cinema than twiddle our thumbs at home. There is a lot to be said about modern cinema, most notably that I don't understand it. The second is that the most interesting things to watch recently are feminist essays seemingly made by and for women who have never seen themselves with their own eyes. That's of course difficult for anybody but when the conclusion of a 2 hour slog is that you can feel validated if you have a lot of sex on your own terms, then you really have the impression that humankind just made a giant leap forward. My girlfriend is curious about the movies because she currently feels at odds with life and struggling. But she's struggling with her mom who didn't make a child to help a new human being make a difference on this planet but to have someone to keep her company, she's struggling with a job, not because any male actor would have tried something fishy, but because no person without or with a little third leg operates anywhere near her speed of reflexion and she's struggling with love, not cheating or being menaced by more beautiful replacements but because she finds it difficult to understand another person and his needs. So I am curious what she gets out of these movies and am surprised to hear that she has empathy for those women being forced into botox, eating disorders and social disadvantage by dominant men. The empathy comes more from liking the same kinds of metaphors and narrative tropes than the actual stories but still, I like to see her care for some form of other. For me personally these problems don't exist. There are only people with whom I want to build something and those I don't care about. What matters is only what they build, there is no hierarchy, only cooperation. So I am there to hear her opinion and then, as we leave the cinema and make our way through the hobos, drug dealers, young mothers and students that could aesthetically fit right into Berlin but aren't there to a cat cafe, where you have a dreamy eyed girl telling her friend about her first days at her job in a law firm, another very chatty one motivating her friend Julien: "You have to go on that foreign exchange! And there you'll make friends with some german students and have fun!" while he's smiling, politely incredulous, oh if younger me had known the concept of a cat cafe, what would I have become? She in any case sounds like my best friend at the time. The tea at least has the right color, the cats are majestic (Main Coon!) and there I get her talking like if we were still university students ourselves. "Did you like it? The soundtrack was okay, you? Loved it, doppelganger motive, evil doppelganger that's my main interest since i started studying Schiele. But then it kind of exploded in campiness? It's the style of movie. A B movie making fun of a B world, nobody gets subtlety anymore." The Substance. "Kidman plays really well. But why wouldn't the guy talk properly? It's a role, he's playing a role. Tasteful right? No bad intentions, just a personal story between two people, where a powerful lady discovered that she wanted to be a kid again and also found somebody who understood her sexual needs. There is a chance of abuse, the owner of the company and when she says: If I want someone to humiliate me, I'll pay for it, how cool was that? Maybe civilization is still reachable after all." Babygirl, good movie. The last movie was more difficult to digest. Maria, about Maria Callas' last days. The cinema was elegant, almost old fashioned, lots of old people and the movie was introduced by the head of a local movie association. Otherwise we would have had to drive to the next bigger box, even further away. Someone blew there nose every 5 seconds, I cried constantly, my girlfriend was gripping her seat. They didn't forecast a rainy day. The movie is both the portray of a legendary woman who has been destroyed by meeting the wrong people and a truly operatic oeuvre in that tragedy oozes from every single scene. My tears flow for the Callas of course, but also because some of the lines she says, hopelessly feeling her passion die and losing her grip on life, I have been hearing word for word. Woe on those who are blessed with a visionary mind but left alone figuring out their future. When you can't help but work running on passion, you do it because you believe in something big and beautiful in comparison to which you are nothing. You can elevate the object of your attention to the most important and precious thing in the eyes of others but the better you are at sublimating an ideal, the better you are at lowering yourself in your own eyes. "I could do so much more", "I am just a nobody", "I gave my all but the world doesn't get it" On the way home I try to lift my girlfriend's spirits, who took it way too personally. "Remember the days when you feel like being the most interesting person around. You have to realize that you can shape your life so that it tells you what you want to hear. Listen when people tell you how you impact their lives. Look for those who work in similar fields. Keep that passion and burn incense on it. Do things only because you want to, nobody is holding you back. Write the best story you have ever heard with your own life." Of course, in 15 years only one word I said has reached her heart: expectation. Whatever happens will be good or bad relative to your expectation. That's a powerful thing to realize.