I saw The Hours. Pretty good. Not a great film though. Philip Glass's piano tinkling is omnipresent and gets irritating quickly (Heard the piano playing on the official movie site? That's basically it for the whole movie). Julianne Moore's and Nicole Kidman's bits were... lacking in the complexity found in Meryl Streep's section.

Still, the film raises the intriguing possibility of people getting stuck in other people's happiness. I suppose as an intellectual or literary device it makes sense -- not everyone has the same idea of happiness. Yet on a more personal level I find it difficult to believe that in a two person relationship, you either force-fit yourself into the other person's idea of happiness or you end up bitter, broken and having to choose between suicide and "life". Relationships aren't that static, are they? Don't people adapt their behaviours to each other to some extent? Takes both people to work for happiness, right? Or is that kind of "happiness" by compromise (for lack of a less suggestive term) a less-adequate happiness than if you found the "perfect" person?

Well... even within that framework couples still break up I guess. I suppose when one party feels that he/she will be happier elsewhere, what is the other party to say? What is she/he to do? I have no answers for that. All I know is that it sucks to be the one left behind, dealing with the fact that the happiness wasn't as -- well -- happy as once believed. The intellectual solution is of course, to analyse and correct. Letting go of someone however, isn't something you can reason out on your own even if you know it was something between the inevitable and the right thing to do.

I wonder how other couples do it? Break up and join up with someone else together so easily like some folk dance. Man, am I missing something here?

Came back and watched Krzysztof Kieslowski's Red, part of his famous Three Colours trilogy. A better movie, I think. I liked the way the movie generated its own self-enclosed logic, its own sense of destiny. The film also deals heavily with human communication, particularly by telephone. A disembodied voice that separates more than it links. But the movie is never ponderous. Slow-moving perhaps, but the plot development is delightful to those who stay awake.