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Convictions of is based upon a short story by the late bestselling novelist and two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee for fiction, Glendon Swarthout. It tells the sad tale of a romance gone bad in Mexico, between Johnson, a thirty-year-old advertising copywriter from Cleveland attempting to write his first novel, and Irene Temple, a middle-aged socialite fleeing a boring marriage in NYC. Mrs. Temple has two daughters in tow, Sheila, 8, and Sara, 6, who have led an untamed life for over a year on the shores of Lake Chapala, Mexico's largest lake, an hour from their second largest city, Guadalajara. Not attending school and picking up only street Spanish and English without being able to read or write, these two little girls become the crux of the problem between the young artist and his older paramour. After a few weeks in the sack with his sexy neighbor, Irene, and fisticuffs one drunken night with her former local lover, Paco Marquez, Johnson spends the night in Ajijic's jail. Sobering up while washing his SUV in the huge lake the next day, Johnson is again enticed by Irene to drive her and the girls up to Brownsville, Texas, so they can renew their six-month tourist visas.
Johnson agrees and begins hatching a plan to get these little girls back
with their attorney father in New York, so they can attend an American
school and get properly educated and socialized. Thus begins a two-day
journey up to the border, where he talks a reluctant Irene into staying
overnight in Brownsville, setting up a surprise meeting with her
ex-husband,
Fred Temple, at
the Texas dentist's the following morning. Johnson slowly realizes that
his writing career is drying up faster than Lake Chapala, and this
tale's poignant climax is a warning to impressionable young artists
about getting sexually involved with their neighbors, to the detriment
of their art and their life. Johnson learns a hard, tragic lesson to the
final tune of Kenny Loggins' hit song, "Convictions of the Heart." And
the viewer is reminded of French philosopher Blaise Pascal's famous
maxim, that "the heart has its reasons, that reason knows nothing
of...." |
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