Daily Dialogue — December 23, 2015

JONATHAN: Hey, excuse me, sir? These are ours.
MALE SHOPPER: Oh, your gloves?
JONATHAN: Yes.
MALE SHOPPER: Well, how come? They’re just sort of hanging there, sleeping with their little price tag on.
JONATHAN: We were just discussing them.
MALE SHOPPER: Well, I have news for you. You can go on discussing them long after I’ve paid for them.
JONATHAN: Calm down, alright, calm down.
MALE SHOPPER: Calm down? It’s five days before Christmas, I’m in the middle of a New York department store, he’s asking me to calm down.
JONATHAN: Listen, these were meant to be a very special gift for someone.
SARA: Yeah, we’ve put quite a lot of thought into those.
MALE SHOPPER: Who were they for?
JONATHAN/SARA (simultaneously): My girlfriend/my boyfriend.
JONATHAN: Her boyfriend.
SARA: His girlfriend.
JONATHAN/SARA (simultaneously): Her boyfriend/his girlfriend.
MALE SHOPPER: One pair of gloves for two people?
JONATHAN: This is hard to explain.
MALE SHOPPER: Try.
JONATHAN: All right. Go ahead.
SARA: Oh. Uh, well, he is at the present time my boyfriend…
JONATHAN: But in 18 months…
SARA: After the operation…
JONATHAN: He will be…
SARA: She will be…
JONATHAN: My girlfriend. Do you understand? (beat) That didn’t really work out.
MALE SHOPPER: No, but Merry Christmas, anyway.

— Serendipity (2001), written by Marc Klein

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Christmas Frenzy. Today’s suggestion by Melinda Mahaffey.

Trivia: A gap of twelve-to-fifteen years was originally intended for the time between the Jonathan and Sara’s first meeting and eventual reunion, and the characters were initially written to be in their early twenties. Audiences felt that both Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack were not ‘fresh faced’ enough to pull off early twenties in the scenes and that the time line had been too poorly established to tell that the characters met in the late 1980s. Eventually, the film was edited and establishes a five year gap between the initial meeting of the characters, and their reunion.

Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by Melinda: “This is one of my favorite Christmas movies, even though it only involves the holidays for about the first 20 minutes. One of its strengths is its witty banter, as seen in scenes like this.”