I started watching that movie again last night, after my mentioning of it here had brought it to mind, and paused it about halfway through, because I thought I was on the verge of falling asleep, though after I’d turned it off and had closed my eyes I remained awake for some time, thinking of the predicament that the characters were in, and what I knew was going to happen to them, in the arc of the story, while they themselves, at the moment that I’d quit watching, were unaware of their fate, which made me feel sorry for them in some very specific way, as if the fiction I knew they were inhabiting, and the artifice of the movie, made of that sorrow a thing tinged with beauty, which I suppose is what it was meant to be, insofar as it was not an accident that I was feeling it, but was a consequence of the filmmaking, and of its formal elements, whereas if the story had been relayed to me in some other way, as a recounting of the plot alone, say, or as a summation of its details, I might feel the sorrow, but I would not necessarily see any beauty.