Delicious dreams fade so fast, but this one lingers longer...
It seemed, it felt, a movie made from a novel, but no novel I have read.
The world: a world where dogmatic occult studies were the norm, and sects and specialties were trained in common institutes, although the hierarchies of disciplines and organizations made for awkward social interactions, as a forced and formatted road map for the haves and have-nots was superimposed on everything.
The opening was on a school of sorts, set in an overcast city, its name and trim lit brightly, back-lit frosted lettering in an alien alphabet. *The viewer, it must be noted, thought that it should have been lit with slightly more colorful neon tubes, the lettering in neon, although said viewer also approved this treatment for the artistic theme of the interpretation by the director. The voice-overs are all a blur, but they related to some minor extent the nature of the world and the educational system.
We then find ourselves in a rather sparce and monochromatic cafeteria style dining hall, where the students are gathered. We find ourselves looking at a table of miscreant children, wearing disheveled and worn garments, traditional gray wool school uniforms with no apparent crests or logos. As they sit murmuring and whispering amongst themselves, obviously students who live with the knowledge of their mediocrity in the heirarchy, they hush and look both respectfully and with a note of longing as a group of tall figures wearing large ornamental headress/helms and long dark robes glide down the center aisle to one of the prominant tables near the front. The voice-over intones that these are the '??? of the light' *a word is lost in the fog of memory. They are clearly the upper eschelon of the school, if not the society.
A stern looking older woman sits at the miscreant table and chastises a girl, who we understand to be our heroine, for slouching and looking reproachfully toward the elites. She straightens and sits properly, glancing nerviously at her peers.
The headmaster makes some sort of announcement, then with a typical and wizardly cliche, summons forth the meal... in this case, what appears to be some sort of roast fowl, chicken or game hen, plops down inelligantly onto the platters in spaced down the long, gray, formica tables. The appearance of overcooked green beans and mashed potato is not shown, but its assumed it was all conjured forth. It is also a safe assumption that the meal is considered mediocre by many, but not our focus, the miscreant table.
Our heroine is looking at the mistress at the table, mocking chewing as she is discreetly moving the food she mocks eating into a dish. As the meal comes to a close the mistress leaves, and so our heroine pours the left over potato and gravy into the bowl she had already moved the green beans and meat into, filled to the point that only surface tension and viscosity are keeping the gravy from running out. She then spends some time securing another bowl to the top of the first, an impromptu lid.
The audio track has been subdued at this point, a noticable quiet. The adolescent heroine and her classmates are at this point having a hushed arguement about what she is doing. She must be insane to do this. She insists her family is alive, and she has found somebody who will help her find them. The food is obviously a payment of sort, but she either says or implies that this person is a mercenary or proffesional... a claim left questionable by this first payment.
She dismisses herself and meanders down a series of halls and out a side door, where she is on a stark sea-cliff, tiered brown stone with moss and close grass on the top of the rocky escarpment. A trail of sorts meanders down toward a tall-grass medow and beyond that, a forest. A thin fog lingers over the damp scene as she makes her way to the forest. At this point, a figure in a gray cloak is slithering along the cliff trail behind her, ameoba like in its movement. *The viewer understand this almost sinister figure to be a person who is a member of a sect that is trained to move so in their gray robes and cloaks. He also has the anticipation that this will be her ally in the upcoming story, but no indication of such is on the screen at this point... our viewer has, after all, read the book.
The next scene (that I recall), is her and several of her miscreant classmates being brought in to an office for questioning, the classmates are dutifully shielding her without lying, but eventually they are lead out and she is alone. Later still, she is being led down the dark monochrome halls toward what is clearly to be some sort of room of review and judgement.
This is where the story fractures and the dream unraveled, but it was clearly anticipated by the viewer that the boy in the gray cloak was going to come in at the last minute of this review and justify her presence on the cliff with a fabrication about her doing him a favor of some sort.... cementing their bond as a duo in the story to come.
It is also clearly understood by the viewer that the mercenary she was taking food too was actually an outcast member of the elite group we glimpsed at the beginning of the 'movie', moving on his own tragectory of revenge and validation.
