Murtada here with a favorite 2015 scene and a warning. Please note this post divulges plot points for Brooklyn.
The setup: Irish immigrant Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) has been seeing her Brooklyn Italian beau Tony (Emory Cohen) for a few weeks when he surprises her with a declaration of love. Not knowing if she loves him back or how to respond, she looks for an answer from one of her house mates at Miss Kehoe's, Sheila (Nora Jane Noone).
Eilis with her housemates including Sheila on her right
This scene could easily be missed, or dismissed as insignificant. But it shouldn’t because as another wise fictional woman knows “life is what happens when you're waiting for a table" or when waiting to use the bathroom. It is a microcosm of the movie’s themes. The immigrant’s longing for their past life even as they know that the life they are building is good.
Eilis needed a push, someone to spur her to open her mind to her new life and to look forward instead of backwards. So she asks Sheila if she wants to get married. Sheila’s answer is full of wisdom yet very simple:
Would I get married again? No. I want to be waiting outside the bathroom of my boarding-house forever.
Of course I do. That’s why I go to that wretched dance every week. I want to be waiting outside my own bathroom. While some bad tempered fella with hair growing out of his ears reads the newspaper on the toilet.
And then she clinches it as only the all-knowing among us can:
And then I’ll wish I was back here, talking to you.
That’s what we all do. Aching for what we had and seldom enjoying what we have at the moment it is happening to us. Eilis knows this new life in Brooklyn - with or without Tony - is much better than what she had in Ireland. Yet she can’t help her broken heart that still brims with love for what she had. In the following scene she accepts Tony’s love, but it would take her many more months and a trip back home to finally get what Sheila was saying.
The scene is memorable for showing us the camaraderie that is enriching Eilis’ new life. That sense of a different community away from home is why we understand her final choice.
What was the moment that moved you most in Brooklyn?