 |
 |  | |
|
User's review
|
|
|
[ATTENTION: This review reveals content of the movie.]
Wow! I have to say the other reviewers really played with my head on this one. But it's my review now, so here goes. Overwhelming, that's the only word I would use to describe this movie until the last five minutes. It dances between two manifestations of the human spirit: redemption and atonement. Those of you who feel you "suffered" this film may never have experienced either of these emotions (lucky you) -- if you did, you would know that they are characterized by absence to what is present (i.e. flashback) Also, as emotions that arise in despair, they are experienced in unbearably enduring now-moments juxtaposed against collapses (I am tempted to say prolapses) of both the past and future. In this movie, the one spiritual need cannot be achieved without the other -- no character can atone unless the other is redeemed. One of the things that the movie does testify to is the way time makes a lie into truth (in terms of how life is lived) -- again this falls back on both atonement and redemption. In that sense the various attempts to reveal human suffering in order to gather a feel for the significance of the inciting incident is well done in the hospital (remember the director has less than two hours) So I think the nature of suffering in the midst of the untrue/unreal is well illustrated for the lovers, although less so for the younger sister. I also thought the director showed a remarkable sensitivity to power dynamics between classes in the early part of the film -- a quality that is embedded in the subtext and makes plausible much of that which follows. Cliche, perhaps, but not a Cole Porter musical. All the same, in the last moments the movie managed to disappoint me when Brionni the character who incites the tragedy through a misrepresentation of the truth, now in her old age, characterizes her novelization of the events as a gesture of atonement, one in which she gives alms to the characters she destroyed by writing a story in which they lived happily ever after. Are we then to suppose that this is a character who still lies both to herself and others in the service of her own emotional vagaries. If the tragic lovers were actual persons, then there is no atonement in fictionalizing thereafter a happy ending that was deprived them in life. The function of that sort of act, if there could ever be one, is to redeem the authoress in her imagination of her own identity, which is to say the novel allows her to imagine she played a role in giving them a life rather than the role of taking it away. Thus, the ending fails to address any of the issues that the movie creates. It fails to treat, in any meaningful way, the IMPOSSIBILITY of atonement, which is what the narrative inevitably creates. Thus I could have lived with an ending in which "all are punished" if I hadn't been given a "fictional" bromide of two lovers walking down the beach as a treatment for the melancholy (yet in many ways relieving) fact that existentially they are long dead.
10/10
18.1.2008 -
com2013@ - age: 13-17
|
| |  |  |
| Note: Reviews posted on this page are personal opinions expressed by our visitors. We are not responsible for their content. |
|
|
|
|
