#thank youuuuuuuu for asking about Lawrence! my beloved!

[queenlucythevaliant]

Story ask game for Lawrence of Arabia, if you please, with a 4, 14, and 21 (for that, assume the "author" is David Lean).

Lawrence! Lawrence! Lawrence!

4: assign the story a hyper-specific genre name

Epic historical wartime adventure biopic tragedy. With camels.

14: how likely do you think the story is to break the reader's heart?

I think it's very much a matter of personal buy-in. If you're the sort of person willing to invest emotionally in four-hour epics from the 60s, then it 100% will break your heart. This movie is devastating. I can quote chapter and verse of all the lines and scenes and moments that wreck me, if you want, but really what it comes down to is Lawrence in the empty Arab Council saying "And that would have been something." Ahhhhhhh. It's a story about reaching and failing to grasp, and those are always the most effective tragedies imo.

21: based on this story, would you be interested enough in the author to read their other work?

I would love to watch every David Lean movie over the course of my life. I've already made a pretty big dent in it! Doctor Zhivago is my next favorite after Lawrence, being a better literary adaptation than 99.9% of amazing novels get. Zhivago is such a literary favorite of mine, and it should be high praise that I love Lean's movie almost as much as I love Pasternak's bittersweet beautiful heartbreak of a novel. Ask me about the book sometime, if you're interested.

I also recently watched Brief Encounter for the first time, which I just loved to pieces. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. The best tragedy of timing that I've experienced in a long time. Will definitely be revisiting in the future.

I will admit, I giggled my way through Bridge Over the River Kwai. It was an excellent movie, but I think the whole "we are BRITISH we are going to build THE GREATEST BRIDGE EVER" thing, which is supposed to be a sign of a semi-broken mind, was just too funny for me to move past in favor of the serious tragedy. Having already seen Tom Hank's The Volunteers, which parodies Bridge Over the River Kwai, didn't really help either.

I will probably give A Passage to India a try next. That's also an adaptation of a novel I thoroughly enjoyed, albeit not in the way I love Zhivago. I'm sure I'll get to his Dickens stuff eventually too, although those will be a harder sell for me. It's a shame he never directed A Tale of Two Cities. I know he's got a bunch of other, lesser known movies too, and I will definitely get to those eventually as well.

So, in short, a resounding yes to the question. I'm not, like, a film person in the way that many people are, but I think I can say with some confidence that Lean is my favorite auteur-director.