I recently saw this new Charlotte Rampling movie. I liked it, but I can’t figure out the ending.
If you haven’t seen the movie, please don’t read this thread! My questions are all about the ending, and so inevitably involves spoilers.
Anyway, I don’t understand the ending when:
John’s English daughter Julie appears. Was the French daughter Julia just a figment of Rampling’s (can’t remember the characters name) imagination? In the very last scene she waves first to the French daughter, and then seems to repeat the same scene but this time she’s waiving to the English daughter. Does this have some connection with the manuscript of Julia’s mother’s book? Is the whole movie just about how Rampling got over her writer’s block by imagining a visitor to her solitude in France? What is the straight dope on this ending?
I realised it was all fake when she volunteered to help get rid of the body, my companion said it was when she invited the gardener up for a quickie. Yes, it was all her imagination.
And were her clothes the mousiest you’ve ever seen, or what?
And is this now a new trend (with Orchid Thief), where the movie is the book and the book is the movie?
coming over from the other thread, I’d like to ask people here - Did you think that the ending weakened the movie because:
[spoiler]It meant that Charlotte Rampling’s emotional liberation was all a fake? The imaginary Julie accuses her of writing about sex and murder but being too emotionally constricted to do anything about them. In the movie we are led to believe that the reason her character aids in covering up the murder is to prove that this accusation is wrong. That, the dancing, the connection with men, the flaunting of her body, are all supposed to show that Julie is causing her to open up.
But if it’s all in her imagination and in the book she’s writing, then the self-accusation is really true. She is emotionally constricted. She has not opened up. Her life truly is a lie she tells to herself.
That’s interesting, in a way, but it makes for a stunted character in a stunted movie. Why did we bother sitting through it, if it’s all a meaningless story inside a story?[/spoiler]
Yes, I think it did weaken the movie, for several of the reasons you state.
I also dislike the whole trend in meta-movies, where what’s happening isn’t what’s happening at all. It’s the brainier version of the “It was all a dream” deus ex machina, and I think in most cases a creative cop out. I liked The Usual Suspects, though think it’s overrated for much the same reason. Yes, we’re an audience and yes, we can be easily manipulated into caring for “phantom” people. But there seems to be a mini-trend, where authorial interiority is presented as reality, only to “twist” the audience at the end; personally, I find it merely exchanges one contrivance (murder mystery hugga-mugga) for another (“Look, it was all in her imagination! Fooled ya!”). The talented Rampling & Sagnier deserved better
Well, I’m not going for another spiler box. There are two spoiler warnings in the title and a nice bold warning in the OP. So…caveat emptor if you’ve gotten this far and still haven’t seen it and don’t want to.
My friend and I saw it last week, and I am tempted to write it off as another “Mulholland Drive.” I don’t really see the point if none of it happened. Even if it was just part of a novel, it sure as hell wasn’t a very good one. It didn’t exactly captivate me before the “twist” or after, which just made it even more pointless for me. And I didn’t really see how her having sex with a gardner and dancing made her emotionally open. That just seemed too heavy-handed.
Is it just me, or do “stories within stories” usually have to cover up with a lot of gratuitious female nudity?
Well, there’s Adaptation, in which the last part is a meta-comment on the rest of the movie which is about trying to write a movie so I think it counts here, and that doesn’t have any nudity at all.
If few/none of the events in France actually happened, why did Sarah take her book to another publisher? She seemed to have cooled considerably toward her editor/boyfriend at the end, which was more understandable if she had actually found out about a second family he had. Was it just that she knew he wouldn’t approve of her branching out and writing something new?
[spoiler]I’m not sure that the book incident really happened. It is simply impossible that she could have taken a book to a rival publisher, have it get all the way to publication, and have it in her hand but still come as a surprise to someone who is himself a publisher. The publishing world is way too small and insular for this to happen. (Although this is a movie and movies always handle books weirdly.)
I’m thinking that the revenge factor is just another self-satisfied masturbatory fantasy of hers against a former? boyfriend.