Hugo
But instead, it starts with Mae.
He sits up in bed, clutching the glowing screen a bit tighter.
She actually did it, he thinks, shaking his head in wonder.
Then he hears her say it: “Fifty years later, so did I.”
He hits Pause, wondering if he could have imagined this.
He rewinds to watch that part again. “Once upon a time, my grandmother fell in love on a train,” she says, her eyes so sad he wishes he could be there with her right now.
(Though hasn’t he been wishing that all day?) She looks straight into the camera when she says it: “Fifty years later, so did I.”
Hugo lowers the phone and stares wide-eyed into the darkness of the hotel room, trying to absorb this. He waits for it to happen: that scuttling feeling in his chest that occurred the first time Margaret said a set of similar words, like an animal trying to hide in plain sight.
But it doesn’t.
To his surprise, he finds himself laughing instead. Not because it’s funny. And not because it’s absurd, though it is. It’s completely and utterly absurd. They’ve known each other only a week. But no: he’s laughing—he realizes—because he’s happy.
And because he loves her too.
It’s a joy that moves through him like helium, filling every corner of his body until it feels as if he could float away. He sits very still for a few seconds, thunderstruck, and then remembers that he needs to watch the rest of the film.
Nothing about it is what he imagined it would be, yet every inch of it feels exactly right.
The interviews aren’t shown as a whole; they’re cut into smaller soundbites, and it jumps around so that it feels like all these various people—himself included—are having one big conversation about what it means to be a person in the world.
And even more than that, what it means to love.
It’s brilliant. It’s moving. It’s funny and unique and inspiring.
It is, in the end, just like Mae.
When it’s over, there are tears in his eyes. He wipes at them, thinking that if he hadn’t already bought a train ticket, he’d surely be buying one now.
But since he did, he just sits there in the darkness and starts the film again.