Literary versus cinematic
On my way home, with the warm bread in my hand, I saw a woman who would have been interesting for a sequel to the 2022 film The Ruler, but perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to tell her, since she was a Civil Guard officer on duty.
I wondered then if what I have just described could be told cinematically. It would even be easy to portray my reaction to that woman on screen, but I don’t see how her presence prior to the evidence that she was a Civil Guard officer on duty could be depicted: in a film, the woman in uniform would be a simultaneous or even prior event to my reaction — she exists first, dressed like that, then I arrive, and finally my thoughts about her, and to represent it any other way would be an unacceptable, treacherous distortion of what actually happened. The thing is, what happened is that I found her dressed as a Civil Guard, I saw her like that from the beginning, but I didn’t think of her that way until the end (or rather: I still hadn’t imagined that her outfit could hamper nice plans), and cannot find how cinema could manage to represent exactly that, as a scene, with a fidelity even comparable to that of the literary story, which in such an easy and natural way can tell it like it is.