Once Upon a Time in America

Once Upon A Time In America swoons in the heady sorrow of nostalgia, every frame aflame with Autumn’s burnished keening, every moment an elegy for the dimming of the day, heaving with the dread sense that  all this must pass, is passing, has already passed, even as the heart holds hopelessly on to the memory of what could be.

Arguably, its most resonant, crystalline scene marks a rare moment of defiance against the passage of time, a Phyrric victory over age’s indomitable armies. Ostensibly a tangential longueur, regarding a peripheral figure, it encapsulates in perfect miniature the film’s bittersweet concerns, and succeeds as a memorable vignette in its own right; a charming, fully-realised story within a story.

We follow, as Patsy – a cub member of the gang, teetering on the cusp of mere adolescence – seeks to lose his virginity, having learnt of a precocious local prostitute who will sell her body for the princely price of a cream cake. Dapper in his Sunday best, Patsy painstakingly chooses the richest, fullest confection from the baker’s lavish display, and waits anxiously on the stairwell outside her tenement apartment for the girl to appear, and his childhood to vanish. Having already caught tantalising sight of the girl’s naked body, her lush, creamy skin, Patsy’s famished gaze turns gradually in the lag of time to the lush, creamy folds of the cake, all trussed in its bodice of bow and ribbon. Unable to resist, he steals a taste; then another; then another; slowly surrendering himself to childish desire, until he has finally devoured the cake whole.

The camera savours the spectacle with an equally deliberate delectation, languidly relishing the moment in a single, lingering shot, Morricone’s wistful score swelling like a fond memory, as the boy – poised poignantly between innocence and experience – momentarily chooses to remain a child, the future held back like a baited breath, all the dubieties of adulthood staved off for a short time yet. Beneath the scene’s sweet icing, there is also possibly a taste of less palatable things to come - the incident providing, as it does, a benign insight into the apprentice gangster’s impatient lust for instant gratification that will ultimately lead Noodles to rape the love of his life – but all of that is in the future. For the time being, like Patsy, we may savour this sweet moment, and leave the worries ahead to themselves.