silver

Ohh this is so hard to choose. All the scenes with his mom are obviously the core of the movie and I just loved watching how Alex kept looking over and checking what her reactions were to the films he made. The scene where his mom goes outside and sees the helicopter literally lifting away a statue of Lenin down the street is visually iconic, as is Alex's quiet breakdown in the hospital when his mom has to be rushed there the second time, with Lana kneeling next to him in that deserted hallway (also the film plays with time - quick cuts and different poses to show time passing). Ariane and Alex having an argument and her stomping off angrily with a bloody nose and Alex going after her with a wet towel and the two of them sitting there in the bathroom, you can tell they are good with each other it's just something else going on. And her basically admitting that the reason she was so off-kilter is because she saw their father and he didn't recognize her and she was so shocked that all she said was thanks for choosing burger king and have a nice day. Also Alex and his friend when his friend is showing him something arty he edited and Alex just quietly nodding off, adorable. (also very https://xkcd.com/920/) Finally there's that short scene where you can see Lana trying to explain to his mom that the wall has fallen (she's like, it's one country! no wall! and his mom going what??) but Alex doesn't know, and still plans out the whole demise of the DDR video. There's a scene where his mom looks over at him and Alex definitely still doesn't know Lana talked to his mom about it; the movie is kind of ambiguous about how much his mom absorbed from Lana's hurried explanation, the narration from Alex's POV is clear he didn't know, but I think she did eventually, and that look, she knew how hard he had tried to keep her safe from shocks and how much he loved her. Ahhh!!

I guess the one that stood out most was actually when Alex decides to go find his father and he's sitting on the couch with his half-siblings he didn't even know about and his dad comes in and sits down and says, Do I know you? And Alex looks over and says yes. And his half-sister I think says "he says his name is Alex!" and you can just see the dad make the connection, and Alex seeing that and clearly having like so so many feelings. The whole thing was so good and they never say their feelings out loud, especially Alex - there's mostly just the dad going "for three years I wrote and thought about you and Ariane every day" - but the acting is so well done and so moving and no amount of words could convey all those feelings as strikingly as it was acted. Like, whew. And I loved that the movie came off that really charged scene, and had Alex quietly riding in the back of the taxi in the dark and having a conversation with the maybe maybe-not cosmonaut turned driver and them talking about what the earth and humans and our problems look like from space. It was such a lovely moment to kind of bring us back from the brink of that moment. I have learned I have a crying button and it can be triggered by parents being sad and worried about their children, somehow. So that particularly hit me hard. (Why? I don't know!)