A Movie a Day, Day 92: Eat Pray Love and Cairo Time

This has been a good summer for something we haven’t seen much in the movies: the female midlife crisis.

A Movie a Day, Day 92: Eat Pray Love and Cairo Time
Photo: IFC Films

This has been a good summer for something we haven’t seen much in the movies: the female midlife crisis. (Could this be the next wave of Baby Boomer self-analysis?) Think Nicole Holofcener’s guiltily bourgeois shop owner in Please Give, the reluctantly maturing gals of Sex and the City 2, the conflicted sisters in Let It Rain and Life During Wartime, Julianne Moore’s restless spouse in The Kids are All Right, and Annette Bening’s grief-frozen woman in Mother and Child. And now come the women of Eat Pray Love and Cairo Time, two American writers on the near side of middle age who go to exotic settings and find themselves.

Eat Pray Love’s Liz Gilbert looks for her bliss with single-minded intensity after leaving her husband. Granting herself a year-long sabbatical, she goes to Italy, where she reconnects with her love of food; India, where she learns to meditate and pray at the ashram of a popular guru; and Indonesia, where she apprentices herself to another guru and finds love – but only after her sensible Balian guru (a magnetic Hadi Subiyanto) advises her to go for it, since losing your footing in love now and then is part of finding your balance in life. Thank goodness he told her, since Liz seems incapable of doing anything without the fortune-cookie blessing of some spiritual leader or other.

Read the rest of this article at TimeOFF.

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This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

Elise Nakhnikian

Elise Nakhnikian has written for Brooklyn Magazine and runs the blog Girls Can Play. She resides in Manhattan with her husband.

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