I have posted here not a short story, but an essay, a sort of late review of an old film, “The Cure”(1995). I think that most professional reviewers in 1995 missed the potential of this movie. It was not the run-of-the-mill tear-jerker, although it surely jerked with almost insolent ease as many tears as one could ask. The movie is a masterpiece, a historical document (a fact which kills many comments made on the spot), and, above all, a tragedy unwittingly (I suppose) built according to the highest models of classical tragedy. There are the chorus, the peripetias, the katastrophé, the deus ex machina, who underlies the tragedy and comes out shortly in the end, bringing us to the final catharsis or purification. Or rather, the catharsis would be fully there, if it were not for the last two lines I have written, which put the movie in a broader setting, which reminds us of Shakespeare’s monologue:”All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.” Alas! For the tragedy of Mankind, the catharsis is still beyond the horizon.