By Irina Pino
HAVANA TIMES – Death never touches icons. It seems to me that it should not happen, so that they last and preserve their splendor. The US blonde God, the sexy actor from the movie Love Story, is gone, dead. Is it true? It is true that he was over eighty years old and was sick. But no, in my mind he is young and vigorous. Without defects.
Youthful years mark purity, such is what that film means. Where young people love each other and break barriers, for the only thing that matters: preserving that feeling, the life that grows between the two. Courage breathes flesh and feeds spirituality.
No one could stop them, and they left. The new city where they lived watched them silently and let them laugh. They were euphoric, in the state that happiness teaches. They lived asleep in fullness. Discovering themselves each day. Living a dazzled daily life.
It is the feeling of being able to trap wonder, not wanting to be alone. Because everything is done naturally. Sincerity is not disguised, it flows like a calm tide. There is no hypocrisy that is acquired as we age.
It seems strange, I saw Ryan O’Neal a few days ago. I don’t know why I decided to pull up the comedy The Main Event. In this film he is a former boxer, who must pay a debt, through fights, to the businesswoman played by Barbra Streisand.
I had fun with this comedy again, admiring the chemistry of the two of them. Perhaps it was a kind of premonition, since it was the last time that his presence burst in and made me remember those seventies, when he shined and was so famous.
O’Neal made many films, however, his Oliver marked us. My sister and I cried every time we watched Love Story. It seemed real, tangible to us. We wanted to fall in love that way. He was the model, the chosen man. Strong in conviction, not afraid to give up things that others would not give up.
We wanted to meet an Oliver Barret, and we would be like Jenny, the girl who tells him before dying of cancer: I don’t want you to be a sad widower. Fall in love again.
Love Story begins at the end when everything is over. The character is sitting on a bench, surrounded by a winter landscape. White is purity, loneliness, uncertainty.
His voice is heard in his voiceover, when he refers to the love that Jeniffer professed for Mozart, Bach, The Beatles, and him.
The phrase is not coincidental. It is impregnated with sensitivity, with a tenderness that overwhelms us and at the same time comforts us. Happiness is what we love and no one can take it away from us.
Then the chords of Francis Lai’s very sad theme song begin. And we are left sore, but satisfied, because fiction is perhaps reality, and vice versa.
Read more from the diary of Irina Pino here.
