Rewatching The Sound of Music.

I decided to rewatch The Sound of Music with my sister, mainly for the nostalgia, but also because it's a great, iconic musical. The last time I'd seen it was years ago when I was a little kid, and I found that there were many scenes in the movie, and many other things about it, that I didn't seem to remember at all. For instance, I didn't remember it being almost three whole hours long. Of course, the runtime was padded by a lengthy opening sequence and an intermission midway through, but even so, that must have left about another two-and-a-half hours. I really didn't remember it being that long. My memory of my childhood seems to be even sketchier than I thought.

The thing about rewatching movies as an adult (I'm using that word loosely...) that you first saw as a kid is that you pick up on things that completely went over your head back then. As a kid I only noticed the music, and had maybe a basic understanding of the plot. I remembered Do Re Mi, Sixteen Going On Seventeen, Edelweiss, and that yodeling song with the puppets, among others. I remembered Maria being a sort of nun who went to the Von Trapp household as a governess, falls in love with the children and eventually becomes their mother. And for whatever reason they all sing together on a stage at the end.

(Sorry for the spoilers, but come on: this film first came out in 1965.)

Today I watched it again with older, wiser (and slowly deteriorating) eyes, and this time I was able to grasp the finer nuances of the movie. From the seriousness of the Nazi occupation of Austria and the tension of the final act, to the body language the characters displayed and certain moments where even the very camerawork helped to portray the mood - I couldn't have been able to appreciate any of this in my primary school years. It was a reflection of how far I've come since then, in terms of understanding films as well as life in general.

Understanding childhood films as an adult is just a microcosm for life itself - things always seem clearer to you as time goes by and you get older. You understand more why things happened the way they did. You understand more why people did what they did. And you understand why everything had to turn out exactly so, even if not in the way you would have liked them to at the time.

Young me would probably have liked The Sound of Music to have a lot less talking and a lot more singing. Older me now gets just how important the talking parts were to the movie, and that if I wanted to just listen to music I'd be better off going on Spotify or YouTube (though to be fair, neither were options back then). Older me understands that it probably wouldn't be classed as one of the greatest musicals of all time if there'd been a lot more singing than there already was, as well as a lot less talking. Musicals aren't all about the music.

Life is like a musical, in a way. And there's a young child in all of us that wishes that there would be more of the happy singing and dancing, and a lot less of the boring (and in some cases depressing) talking parts. But just like a musical, we really have to have both for it all to make sense.