A good film often has just one image. The rest of the movie is either leading to or away from this one image, the core of a sequence. (We must remember that the root meaning of the word "core" is "heart.") The core image is the heart of the movie; it pumps life through the entire body of the work. And the closer an image is to this core, either by approach or departure, the richer and more meaningful it is. In the French movie Welcome, for example, the core image is of a young man swimming across the English Channel. The clouds are low, the air is cold, and the young man (an Iraqi who has been taking swimming lessons from a heartbroken Frenchman—Vincent Lindon) is rising and falling with the big waves of the heartless, inhuman sea. Behind him is France; in front, Great Britain. He is swimming to the woman he will love to the last beat of his heart.

With Mid-August Lunch, the core is not dramatic and somber; it is light and lyrical. The film begins with a man living an average life in the old city of Rome. His name is Gianni (Gianni Di Gregorio—who is the director of the film and also one of the screenwriters of the hyperviolent Gomorra), he is crowding 50, he is a bachelor, he lives with his ancient mother. Gianni always has a glass of white wine in his right hand. One day his landlord informs him that he is behind on some bills. The landlord, however, is not a big asshole. He is a little one. He has a compromise. It is this: If Gianni looks after his own ancient mother during an upcoming holiday, he will forgive the debt. Gianni accepts the offer. The reason why the landlord is still an asshole, though a little one, is he brings his mother and her sister. Gianni has to take care of three grannies.

When the local doctor learns of the situation—Gianni is watching three old women—he takes advantage of it by leaving his mother in Gianni's care. Despite the setting—four very old, very worn, very picky women in a small apartment—the movie is delightful. The first reason for this is that Gianni has about him the kind of charm that all humans must cultivate when on that borderline between twilight of the middle years and dawn of senescence. Second is that image, the movie's light and lyrical core.

It happens in the second half of the film. Gianni is out shopping for the old and picky women. He has a bag, he buys this and that, he drinks a glass of wine with a friend, he hops onto his friend's motorbike and is carried up and down the streets of Rome. This is the locus of the core—the sequence on the motorbike. We see the city, the people on the sidewalks, the lively traffic, the sunlight reflected on windows and falling on the concrete. The wind is in Gianni's hair, the groceries in the bag, and at that moment, we suddenly understand the meaning of the movie: "Sun in the sky, you know how I feel/Breeze driftin' on by, you know how I feel." This is the bearable lightness of being.

Cores do not always involve a moment in movement: swimming across the sea, riding a motorbike on a city street. The moment that makes a movie can be drawn from a sequence or situation that has little or no movement. For example, the core of Claire Denis's Vendredi Soir, which also stars the heartbroken swimming coach in Welcome (Vincent Lindon), is the surfaces, the skin of two people who are fucking in a hotel room with beautiful wallpaper. As the whole movie is a journey to the geography of their flesh, the whole of Mid-August Lunch is a journey to the wonderful moment on the motorbike. recommended