Lingering in the Idyll

I’ve been revisiting a script I wrote twenty-five years ago. Not polishing it so much as listening to it, the way you listen to an old record and hear more than the music. You remember a time, a place, who you were with.

The script is Postcard From Italy. It was sparked by my travels there. Lazy afternoons. Surprising rain showers. Water taxis. Train platforms. Espresso taken standing up like a local. That particular European suspension of time where nobody seems in a hurry and you believe life might stay that way.

You can date the script instantly. Flip phones. CD players. People calling on landlines. But the technology isn’t the only thing that gives it away. What dates it is something more revealing.

Back then, I wrote a very long idyll.

Back then, I didn’t know what an idyll was.

If you’re unfamiliar, it’s the longest uninterrupted stretch in a film where desire appears consequence-free. It’s the part where characters believe they can have what they want without the universe taking notice. Attraction hums. Choices feel reversible. The bill hasn’t arrived.

It’s an intoxicating place to write from. Everything feels alive. Characters flirt with who they might become. Danger exists only as an idea. And if you’re not careful, you linger there.

Reading my younger self on the page, I can see exactly where I didn’t want to leave that space. Scenes dawdle. Emotional beats repeat instead of quicken. Consequences are deferred with charm. At the time, I thought I was letting the story breathe. In truth, I was indulging the illusion.

But the idyll is a lie. And stories don’t move until it collapses.

Desire only becomes interesting when it carries risk. Once wanting something starts to cost something, that’s when momentum kicks in. Not when characters are free, but when they realize they aren’t. The more indulgent the pleasure, the harder the reckoning that follows.

I couldn’t have done this rewrite twenty-five years ago. I didn’t understand then how desire becomes debt. I didn’t know that the idyll isn’t the heart of the story. It’s the contrast that makes the rest hurt.

The idyll is beautiful. It’s necessary. But it’s not the destination.

It’s the last place in a film where desire still thinks it’s safe.

Oh. And did I write a tragedy? Well, it’s not a Hollywood ending, that’s for sure.