My grad advisor in British Romanticism, Brad Mudge, had this thing where he’d ask, after reading a poem, where the poem “breathes.” I always loved that question; I love it still. It speaks to me of understanding that art will, when it’s done well, cease to become something extant and begin to become something internal. The Romanticists–Shelley, I think it was–talk about the words of poets as seeds that engender new ideas in the heart of the reader. The moment I’m Your Woman “breathes” for me is in a diner sequence midway through where our hero, Jean (Rachel Brosnahan), tells her temporary protector, Cal (Arinze Kene), how after a series of miscarriages, she “burned” all the desire for a child out of herself to protect herself from more heartbreak. Already a good film, I’m Your Woman becomes a great one here in this open, vulnerable conversation about something that happens to as many as 20% of known pregnancies. It’s so prevalent an event that common wisdom dictates you don’t share your pregnancy news until well into a pregnancy in anticipation of it. My wife and I suffered three miscarriages (one more traumatic than the others, all of them a death of hope) before we successfully carried our first child to term.

Towards the end of Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin's The Climb, anti-hero Mike goes to see a movie by himself at an arthouse theatre doing a repertory screening of Pierre Étaix's Le Grand Amour. The scene quoted in brief is part of the film's framing device in which the hero, played by Étaix himself, is about to be married, an event which causes him to ruminate on past loves and the series of events leading up to this moment. In speaking with Mr. Covino and Mr. Marvin, I misremembered a Jerry Lewis quote about Étaix, thinking he'd said he had met two geniuses in his life: himself and Étaix. In truth, what he'd said was he understood what genius was twice, the first time when he looked up the word in the dictionary, the second when he met Étaix. The truth paints Lewis in a better light, but it's not as funny. Lewis went on to cast Étaix in his self-suppressed Holocaust melodrama The Day the Clown Cried.