--this is, I feel, our best way to understand eternity. It sounds like the film did it beautifully.

I've never seen anything like it in a movie. It could have been cloying or overplayed and instead it was a fantastically numinous and earthed note to go out on. And I wasn't expecting it, because the novel doesn't use it. The film is aware of time differently than the novel, I think, and very congenially to me.

I love how you describe the film's portrayal of summer, too: languorous, timeless, "a milk-haze of light so thick and heady, it seems always on the verge of gathering to a storm." Beautiful.

The whole film is like that. I think you might like it a lot.