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blue squares posted:What a strange and beautiful film. It was PTA's slowest, I thought, and I did get a bit bored at times. But trying to decipher the characters was great, and the ending really pleased me. However, I didn't quite get it. I don't know what the theme was. Idk there's a lot to grab hold of but what I walked away with was Reynolds's obsession with routine and stricture is an expression of profound fear of death, and Alma discovers that the only way to draw the human out of his calcified existence is to force a confrontation with his mortality. He realizes this too and it's the foundation for their lasting love. At the end, Alma talks about believing in the persistence of their love through multiple lives, which completes an arc of death-fearing homeostasis -> embracing a cycle of life and death. Remember that when Reynolds got bored of his other girlfriends, he had Cyril just send them off; he never confronted or reckoned with the ends of those relationships, either. But we see Reynolds and Alma overcome multiple breakdowns of their relationship and still take it up again. Actual love dies but resurrects. I'm enamored with PTA's really restrained use of surreal imagery between this and The Master.
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# ¿ Jan 19, 2018 19:57 |
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# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 22:44 |
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Escobarbarian posted:One thing: the wiki synopsis states that Woodcock dies not long after the second poisoning/framing device conversations, but that’s not actually made clear at all, is it? I don't think that's in the film. I actually felt like after the first poisoning we were meant to think maybe he had died by the time of the frame scenes, with the reveal of how he's been in her lap the whole time at the end being a twist that casts warmth on ambiguous things we'd seen/heard before (without resolving all of the ambiguities). WOODCOCK DIED NOT LONG AFTER would be a dumb way to undercut that
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# ¿ Feb 10, 2018 21:50 |