By Amy Alkon

Q: Two friends of mine are in “love at first sight” relationships. (One went from chills at seeing the guy to moving in with him weeks later.) Each has said to me, “When it’s right, you just know.” Well, as I get to know this new guy I’m seeing, I like him more and more. It’s just not the instant love of the century like they have, and that makes me feel a little bad.—Lacking Thunderbolts

A: Getting the chills the moment you set eyes on a person may be a sign that you have love at first sight—or an incipient case of malaria. (In time, you’ll find out whether you have lasting love or lasting liver damage, seizures and death.)

Love at first sight is made out to be the rare, limited-edition Prada purse of relationships—that extra-special luvvier kind of love that we romantic commoners don’t get access to. However, what the “first-sighters” actually have is not the enduring love that poets write about, but the kind animal behaviorists do—when the boy baboon spots the girl baboon’s big red booty. People in this fleeting first phase of love are basically on a biochemical bender, high off their asses from raging hormones and neurotransmitters, and shouldn’t be operating heavy machinery or making plans any heavier than where to show up for dinner on Tuesday.

Those who end up staying together will often say with a sniff, “We just knew!”—which sounds better than, “We are idiots who got hitched 20 minutes after meeting and got lucky we turned out to be well-matched.” Their initial belief that they’re perfect for each other is probably driven by a cognitive bias—an error in reasoning—that psychologists call “the halo effect.” Like the glow cast by a halo, the glow from, “Wow, she’s hot!” spills over, leading to an unsupported positive view of a person’s as-yet-unseen qualities. But, early in a relationship, you can only guess how someone will behave—say, at 3am, when you’re awakened by period cramps that feel as if some big Vegas boxing match accidentally got scheduled in your uterus. Will he mumble, “Feel better” and roll over, or go to the drugstore and roll you home a barrel of hippo-strength Midol?

Maybe real romance is finding out all the ways somebody’s disturbingly human and loving them anyway. This happens about a year in, after the party manners have fallen off and after you see—for example—whether your partner fights ugly or like someone who loves you but thinks you’ve temporarily fallen into the idiot bin. In other words, you’re wise to get to know this guy instead of immediately drawing little sparkly hearts in your head about your magical future together. Keep unpacking who you both are and see whether you keep wanting more—or whether one of you goes out for a smoke and, a month later, sends a postcard from the Netherlands.

Q: I’m in my early 40s and newly divorced. I fooled around with this guy—my first time with somebody besides my husband in 12 years. We had weekend plans, but two days passed with no texts from him. I texted him angrily, repeatedly telling him he’d hurt my feelings, and he cut off contact. Now, months later, he has resurfaced, saying I’ve been in his thoughts. What could he want?—Puzzled

A: Men you’ve dated briefly will sometimes resurface—much like bloated dead bodies in New York’s East River.

As for why this one’s coming around again, chances are, the paint on “she’s crazy” dried and he remembered that you are also pretty and do that crazy thing with your tongue. OK, so you were short on nonchalance in your first post-divorce dating situation. After a long sex-and-affection famine, a newly divorced woman, like any starving refugee, is unlikely to simply nudge a hot piece of meat around on her plate like one of those skeletal “ladies who lunch” (but do not eat).

The truth is you probably weren’t going off on him merely because he failed to meet your text-pectations. Your behavior most likely stemmed from what psychologists call a “priming effect,” describing how exposure to one situation colors how you react to another. Being mindful of this can help you tell a guy what you need and give him a chance to come through—instead of immediately texting him with all the casual cool of a kidnapper demanding a bag of unmarked small bills. Should you give this guy another chance, see that you’re only asking questions he’s prepared to answer, like where he went to elementary school and why his previous relationship ended—not, “Will I be alone forever?” and, “Wanna come over and try to fill the vast void I have inside?”

by Samantha Campos

Sir Ian McKellen arrived to a legion of fans who’d gathered on the sidewalk alongside a red carpet leading into the Smith Rafael Film Center on Sunday, October 11. Accompanied by an entourage, McKellen walked, beaming, towards the photographers’ pen, stopping short to ensure that a young girl got “a good shot.”

Inside the theater a few minutes later, Mill Valley Film Festival (MVFF) Director Mark Fishkin ran through McKellen’s illustrious career and awards, then showed a montage of such crowd-pleasers as Gods and Monsters, Lord of the Rings and X-Men. Before presenting the Lifetime Achievement Award on behalf of MVFF, surprise guest Armistead Maupin, famed author of Tales of the City, regaled attendees with stories about his friend of 35 years, including the time McKellen stayed at his house and left a note on the pillowcase that read, “Gandalf and Magneto slept here—with each other.”

Onstage with Zoe Elton, MVFF’s director of programming, McKellen discussed his thespian origins. “I was brought up in the north of England, in a town where there were three live theaters, and my parents used to take me to them,” he said. “I was so enchanted by what I saw. How do they do it, is what I wanted to find out. What happens behind that curtain? How do they learn their lines? How is it all done? It was because of that, I decided to act.”

At the start of his career, McKellen often performed in very large theaters, with 1,500 people in attendance. “So I was a big actor—at times perhaps thought to be a bit overblown,” he said. Then he did Macbeth in 1976 with Judi Dench at a Stratford-upon-Avon theater of just 100 people.

“You didn’t have to project your performance, you didn’t have to tell the audience what to look at—they were close enough to touch you,” McKellen said. “And I loved it. It was that production that was the preparation that got me ready for the closest audience of all, which is the camera.

“Acting is the same whether you’re in front of a camera or in front of a live, large audience. It’s the degree of

presentation which makes the difference.”

Clips were shown of McKellen’s cinematic roles in Cold Comfort Farm (1995), Richard III (1995), Lord of the Rings (2001-2), Gods and Monsters (1998) and Mr. Holmes (2015), and in between, he charmed the crowd with reenacted lines, behind-the-scenes stories, impressions of other actors and tales of working with Ava Gardner. Then he graciously answered audience questions about his status as an openly gay actor.

“When I came out, some longtime gay activists assumed that I would now turn myself into a ‘queer artist,’” he said, “that I would stop playing the sort of parts I play and just concentrate on gay-related plays and films. And I said, ‘No, I can’t!’ I find that heterosexuality is far too interesting a phenomenon to be ignored.”

McKellen expressed his joy for “telling stories to real people,” whatever the medium. “Sometimes we get it wrong,” he said. “Perhaps the script’s not quite good enough. Perhaps we didn’t work quite hard enough. But when we do and it all comes together, then the magic of the movies is that it’s there for all time, for others to see.”

* * *

On Thursday, October 15, MVFF paid tribute to documentarian Marcel Ophuls. Born in Germany in 1927, Ophuls is considered one of the most important filmmakers of the world, garnering critical acclaim for his work including, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), an Oscar-nominated examination of France under Nazi occupation, which was later featured in the story arc of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall; and Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Before screening ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Un Voyageur), Ophuls explained how he made the 2013 autobiographical film as a precursor to his memoirs, and quipped that it’s “short” at 106 minutes (The Sorrow and the Pity runs 251 minutes; Hotel Terminus is 267 minutes).

Afterwards, Ophuls conversed on stage with Peter Stein, Peabody Award-winning filmmaker and former executive director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Ophuls discussed how most of his films were journalistic assignments, and that his best movie was The Memory of Justice.

Peter Stein: [The Memory of Justice (1976)] is a brave film because once again, you turn your attention toward the crimes under Nazism, but through the lens of the Vietnam War. And Algeria.

Marcel Ophuls: That’s the Nuremberg principle. It was supposed to bring justice to the world, and of course, it didn’t. Because there is no justice in the world. There can’t ever be. For a while, we felt it could be possible. No, these things are still with us, and the danger is still here.

Stein: Your films set a certain moral bar for what film can do in the way of exposing some deep national truths, starting with The Sorrow and the Pity. You’re revealing something about French activity during the occupation that was kind of an overturning of “an official version,” as Stanley Kauffmann used to call it. Was that intentional or did you discover that in the making of the film?

Ophuls: Both. The time had come for somebody to—in films, in books—put an end to the godless, Communist mythology about a country having all resist the invader. No country ever does that. In no crisis in life is that ever possible.

Stein: One of your great contributions to cinema is allowing a big story to fill a big space of time.

Ophuls: Actors can give you on the screen their personality in three minutes—great actors, even less. But for real people to stop being just talking heads, you have to give them time so that people can judge for themselves. I’m not the one who invented that. To me, documentaries are all about spontaneity.

by Mal Karman

Believe it or not, the 38th Mill Valley Film Festival, which wrapped on Sunday with a closing night bash at Terrapin Crossroads, is now older than the median age in this country. While we predicted that Eddie Redmayne would win the Academy Award for Best Actor and told him so at last year’s festival, we won’t stick our necks out quite that far this time. But do look for Brie Larson to at least get trumpeted for a nomination for her role in Room.  

Not unprecedented, but still a bit of a longshot because of his age, 9-year-old Jacob Tremblay deserves a nom for supporting. To prep for the part as a young woman imprisoned for years with her little boy in a backyard shed, the disarmingly articulate Larson, whose agent told her that she would never get the role, says, “[I] trapped myself in my house for a month, with no TV, no junk food, no Internet, out of the sun, meditating a lot. I worked with trauma specialists, about what would happen to her mind, where survival is the main focus of the brain. I talked with doctors and a nutritionist about the effects of this imprisonment …

“It was complicated,” she continues. “It did seem insurmountable at first. I had to find her, look at who she was up to 17 when she was abducted. I wrote three diaries, for when she was 10, 14, and 15 or 16—my way of delving into an adolescent mind worrying about her body, wishing mom would let her get highlights. I tried to understand the frustration of what this woman would have to go through day after day.” Room won the MVFF Audience Favorite, Gold Award for 2015 U.S. Cinema. Look for it on Oscar night.

You can call us crazy (and you’d probably be right) but on the ninth day of the festival, we walked into Marcel Ophuls’ four-hour and 20-minute The Sorrow and the Pity, then dragged ourselves directly to the wacky Icelandic comedy Rams and, finally, practically crawled into a screening of Truth, a mere eight-plus hours of nonstop viewing. And, yes, we have an eye exam next week. The soon-to-be (on November 1) 88-year-old Ophuls appeared on stage for a tribute and an exchange with the audience, and spontaneously broke into song with “San Francisco, open your Golden Gate.” That was a bit of a curiosity for a man who candidly admitted to us that, on three occasions, he tried to kill himself.  “It’s the only way you can escape from life,” he said. “But as I didn’t succeed, I am here. You learn, as you get older, to become more interested in yourself. And that animals are preferable to people.”

When Carey Mulligan met us on the red carpet she had tears in her eyes. We were about to ask if we were that frightening, but she explained that the California air had sent up alarm bells for her allergies. The British-born actress, who has the lead in Suffragette, about women’s fight for the right to vote in England, surprised us with the news that her career got off to a bumpy start.  First, her parents “were not wild about my going to drama school. I applied secretly to three and snuck away to audition, but I got rejected at all three. My mum and dad busted me and it was awful!” Then, after landing her first role (in Pride and Prejudice), she says, “I didn’t know what I was doing and I was freaked out acting in scenes with [legendary] Judi Dench. [Director] Joe Wright came up to me and said, ‘Carey, you actually need to do something.’ But I had nothing to do except giggle and run around and call room service. I thought all roles would be like this.” 

The hand-me-down clothes and toe-crunching shoes she wore in Suffragette could have easily dispelled that fantasy. Director Sarah Gavron says, “Carey prepped for this by going to work in a laundry and didn’t wash her hair for three weeks. And those clothes are made to be uncomfortable. I’d been trying to get this film done for 10 years and had Carey in mind right from the start.” (Really? Mulligan would have been but 20 a decade ago.) “We were told it would take almost a month to hear whether she would take on the part, so I went off on holiday. Two days later, I got a call she wanted to see us, so I flew back, talking to her for 15 minutes feverishly and without taking a breath until she stopped me and said, ‘I’ll do it.’ We built the cast (including Helena Bonham Carter and Meryl Streep) around her. There has never been a screen version of this issue. It is still relevant, there are still gender gap issues today.”  (Suffragette was the first film to ever receive an OK to film in the UK’s House of Parliament.)

Gandalf the Grey, otherwise known in real life as Sir Ian McKellen, jumped into the vat of estrogen by suggesting that he engage with audiences on the topic of women with whom he has worked, among others Ava Gardner, Judi Dench, Jane Seymour, Bridget Fonda, Greta Scacchi and Annette Bening. The last-minute McKellen Harem program, as we like to call it, proved a risqué success.

There was so much estrogen surging through this 11-day showcase with more than 40 films, exhibits and panels referencing the gender gap, salary gap, power gap and recognition gap that women face in the workplace today, we just have to wonder why Gap (clothing store) did not tear off its underwear to become a sponsor. Had any of us been in doubt about the fest’s focus on the female, we had only to look at a few of the film titles: The Girl in the Book, the Girl King, the Danish Girl, Black Girl, Bunny New Girl and The Satellite Girl and Milk Cow.

Tiburon’s Robin Hauser Reynolds took home a MVFF Audience Favorite Gold

Award in Active Cinema for her Code: Debugging the Gender Gap while San Anselmo’s Eli Adler and San Rafael’s Blair Gershkow captured an Audience Favorite, Gold Award for documentary filmmaking with their Surviving Skokie. Berkeley director Rob Nilsson, who has been landing films in the Mill Valley Film Festival since the festival was in its toddler years and this season premiered his Permission to Touch, jokes that sometimes he feels he is running a pyramid scheme, getting the funding for his next film just in time to use the money to complete his last one. Swiss German director Barbet Schroeder asked his mother to get out of her house in Ibiza for a month so he could shoot Amnesia there. Since the film screened here, she apparently agreed to go.

The 38th edition of the annual autumn event drew more than 68,000 to the festival’s venues in Mill Valley, Larkspur, Corte Madera and San Rafael. That’s a lot of movie-loving people moving through Marin.