Lost in New York (4 Stars)

Two girls meet and become friends immediately. How old are they? I always have trouble judging the ages of young children. Marie (on the left) is five, and Michèle (on the right) is ten? Something like that.

The story begins in the north of France. When they meet, Marie is crying. She's sad because nobody will play with her. Michèle offers her friendship, so they go together into a barn. Marie has a statue of the Moon Goddess, and she says that with it they can travel anywhere. They go to New York, expecting a magical adventure. Unfortunately, the Moon Goddess's spell doesn't work as expected. They're separated and find themselves on opposite sides of Manhattan. Their love for one another acts as a homing beacon and draws them together, but it's a long distance, and the city's streets are like a labyrinth. There are also dangers. Michèle encounters a vampiress, and in her childish naivety she willingly offers her neck.

The two girls, who have magically become ten years older, narrowly miss one another in Coney Island. Eventually they meet on the Brooklyn Bridge and run back to Manhattan, hand in hand. But their joy is only short-lived. The spell ends. Michèle returns to the beach near her home in France, but Marie remains in New York.

For the next 60 years Michèle visits the beach every day, searching for Marie. 60 long, lonely years. Michèle carries the statue with her at all times, but its magic has been spent. Finally she smashes the statue, and the Moon Goddess herself appears. She casts a spell to reunite the two friends.

Is it a dream? Is it reality? Is all of life a dream? That's something I've asked myself more than once. If all my life were a dream, would it make any difference? What would my life, if it were real, contribute to reality? In the late 1980's I wrote a lot of software for Porsche, so if you drive an early 1990's Porsche you have my software in one of the black boxes under the hood. But how long did the software survive? I expect that within five years the engines were improved and new software was written, so my modules disappeared one by one.

What about the film reviews I write now? I like to think of my blog as something that will last, but will it really? My blog is free now, but maybe a year after my death Google will decide to make it a paid service, and my no longer monitored email account will receive final notices to pay to stop the blog being deleted. Or maybe Google itself will go bankrupt in the near future, and everything will disappear overnight. My life has no meaning in the grand scheme of things, so it might as well be a dream.

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