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Day | Feb 27 2006

Back when I depressed and watched a lot of television, I’d often find myself clicking on Groundhog Day, which was then making the rounds of the cable movie channels. I never saw the film from the beginning. Instead I’d start somewhere in the middle and watch perhaps fifteen minutes before changing the channel. It was an apt approach to this film, which if you don’t know is about a man who wakes each morning to the same day.

It’s not an easy life. He loves a woman, a colleague, who considers him a jerk. Which he is, or has been, although in time this changes. Here’s what’s strange: It’s the same day over and over and yet he’s capable of change. Each morning is the same as the previous morning, with one exception: him. He’s different because he has lived this day before, lived it many times, in many ways. And these experiences have changed him and are changing him still.

To win the heart of the woman he loves, he resorts to tricks. One involves flowers. I forget how he does this, but he discovers the woman’s favorite flower. Wait, no, I’m sorry… this is a different film, one about a man who loves a woman who believes, like the man in Groundhog Day, that every day is the same day. But her reason is different: she has brain damage. To spare her the anguish of learning the truth, a truth she will forget by the following morning, leaving her vulnerable once again to its discovery, her family plays along with her belief that today is last day she remembers, the day of her accident.

Now I think the two films should be combined into a hybrid film, one about a woman who, because of brain damage, believes, like the man in Groundhog Day, that she’s stuck in a time loop. Her family plays along with this delusion to protect her from the truth, which is that she keeps trying to win the heart of a man who already loves her and who is guilt-stricken because he’s the one who caused her accident. He did this by leaving a box of chocolates outside her door. She tripped over the chocolates and hit her head. The film is called Valentine’s Day.