Am I wrong in thinking this short film is an homage to Ernest Hemingway's short story "A Clean Well Lighted Place?" That story and this have so many parallels. In Hemingway's story, an old man sits at a table at a cafe or restaurant at the end of the evening, with a pile of saucers in front of him, drinking coffee, observed by two waiters, one who is sympathetic, the other who is not. It is late and they should have closed already and one want to turf the old man out and go, while the other wants to give the old man a bit more time. They discuss this, maybe the impatient one gets a bit tetchy, can't quite remember, but in the end they close for the night and the old man leaves. What is not written, what is left out of the story, is what happens afterwards, which is that the old man kills himself. It was a legendary literary experiment by Hemingway to see if knowledge of a key event in the writer's mind would inform the text and communicate to the reader, although the writer intentionally did not include the event in the text, part of his theory, if I recall correctly, that a fiction operates like an iceberg, with a lot of its functional parts invisible to the reader. Actually, the experiment failed with me in that story by Hemingway, at least; I thought the story was rather flat and dull and did not intuit the unspoken suicide at the end.
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