Jacob Feldman - Films and Levels – 3. Humans and Angels

The little girl lives with her mother. They apply for a prestigious school for the girl, but fail at interview.

Now Mother insists that girl must work all summer to get ready for the next try. Mother declares hard schedule for the girl. But she goes to work, and the girl accidentally happens to visit an old neighbor, who tells her «tale of the Little Prince.»

The old man lives alone, he has no friends or relatives, nobody in all the world. One evening he is taken to the hospital. Early in the morning, the girl makes the mother to visit the old man.

Between these two events, she sleeps and has a dream in which she meets a characters of the tale, meet the Prince and help him to return home.

The filmmakers took over a difficult task: take a classic literary tale of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, written in 1943, and incorporate it into a modern story of life of the little American girl.

This is a very hard task. To solve it they have to sacrifice what I call «self-consistency». On this occasion, I had a few questions. On some of them, I thought, I found answers, to other – no. These questions and these answers I lay out them below.

First question. The girl was not enrolled at school after the first interview, but she was accepted without another interview later. How it could be? To answer this question we need some knowledge of American life.

As a rule, children who live in a certain district are getting enrolled into this district’s school without taking exams. Children from outside the district cannot get into the school anyway. The case that a «nonresidents» have an opportunity to get into this specific school through the interview is a rare exception.

Therefore, plan B was about a moving to this specific district. Good district school is usually a sign of rich households’ area. Hence, rent a house is more expensive here. Mom’s salary is the only source of family’s budget, Dad does not pay. To keep within the budget, the mother decides to move into the only house with relatively low rent. Rent is low because the house has a bad reputation. And this is because of old neighbor which is presumably mad.

The old neighbor’s house is very old too. Probably, all old houses around were destroyed some years ago and new standard comfortable houses were built instead. A similar situation is presented in the film «Up». It is likely that the old man lives here all his life.

Second question. It seems that the old man never had a wife, children, at least in the film there is not a word about them, about the parents or other friends or relatives. But the old man is not upset, he builds his fairy world for himself «as he was a child.» That is crazy.

But he does not want to be crazy. He tries to make friends with everyone who lives next door, but they refer to him as to the merits of a lower order. It is possible that the old man is rare – by the standards of modern America – taking a shower, and he smells bad.

Third question. The girl has a cellphone; the old man has not, even a wired one. How he gets a food? He has no driver license. Does he walk to the food store? No. The food store is too far from the house. He does not walk far. What does he eat? We know about sandwich he keeps in a pocket for many days. Probably somebody had have license and drove the car, bought and brought food. Who? His wife? Probably not long ago she died. Probably. Probably the only food in the house were from that time.