“Would you still be my friend if there were things about me you didn’t know?” Celeste asks her friend Theo while they’re on a seesaw. The two of them start an innocent game and come up with increasingly surreal questions.
How far do they go to realize how much they mean to each other?
Movie Lesson Theo and Celeste
Watch the amazing short film Theo and Celeste by the Australian filmmaker Hannah Dougherty. It was selected to be made for TEDx Sydney 2018 and became part of the film program that featured shorts based on the theme of Humankind.
Download your Transcript and Glossary Theo and Celeste.
Story
The movie starts in a beautifully painted set with puppets that seem to have popped out of a Van Gogh painting. It’s a magical environment where tiny bugs jump from one plant to another, flowers sway peacefully in the breeze, and birds tweet happily in the sky. The live action features hand-painted actors who replicate all the visual elements of the puppets’ world. You can see the same color palette and perceive the same atmosphere.
Would you still be my friend if every time I laughed spiders crawled out of my mouth?
Yes. What about me? Would you still be my friend if I had daymares?
The two friends always accept each other, no matter what grotesque aspects or absurd habits they have. Theo doesn’t care about spiders crawling out of Celeste’s mouth or that she has a bagpipe on her back. It doesn’t matter to him either that her body is covered with poisonous spikes.
In the same way, Celeste accepts an onion-smelling Theo with a disgusting-looking tongue.
The answer is always, “Yes. I would still be your friend.” They have a childlike joy of testing the boundaries of their friendship. When the question turns into, “Would you still love me if,” the seesaw they ride gets higher and higher in the air and hurls them into the universe. Their relationship is in a new dimension now. They’re testing the limits of their just-affirmed love.
But would this love last forever? Beyond death, too?
Would you still love me if you couldn’t see me, or touch me, or taste me, or smell me, or hear me?
And Theo shouts the answer from the deepest part of his heart: “Yes, of course, yes.”
Their relationship goes beyond the “would you love me if” scenario. It’s all about yes. In any case. Anyway. Forever.
Study Time
The film is a brilliant example of how you can use the second conditional when it comes to talking about hypotheses.
Do you know that there are various conditionals in English? Let’s see how to use them in the infographic below.
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