Great dinner last night at Marty Peretz house, following a showing of the upcoming HBO movie, Sergio. We spent time at the dinner wondering what the two sentence follow-on should be to best present Sergio to the public, but didn’t really get very far. Cass Sunstein, there in his role as Samantha Powers’ spousal partner, otherwise very quiet in the evening, suggested, “An American Story.” That seems odd at first, since Sergio was a man from Rio, a champion of the United Nations, yet also fitting as a description of this movie, which had as its stars not Sergio but two American soldiers in Iraq and a beautiful woman from Argentina. In one sense this film is a search-and-rescue story. In another, a love story, touching and complicated. Yet finally and ultimately, perhaps, an American story, set in Bagdad in May 2003. There are those seeing this film who will want to know more about Sergio, the charismatic figure at the center of the story, a man whose adventures and intellectual trajectory took him from Rio to the streets of Paris when he was a young student with radical politics studying in Paris at the Sorbonne to the plight of refugees displaced by genocides and wars. There will be those who want more of the love story.
I want more of the fine conversations that came following, and the fine company. Thank you Marty.
