Opening by Michel Legrand from The Go-Between

Recurring music

Gracie is nearing sixty and has lived for 24 years with Joe by whom she had three children, including twins of high school age.

From her first marriage to Tom was born Georgie, who at 13 was a schoolmate of her mother's current husband.

A scandal and the crime of child abuse had sentenced the young man's pregnant woman to prison.

It is now 2015 and the couple is still together and someone decided to make a film about the period from 1992 to 1994.

The main character, well-known actress Elisabeth Berry travels to Savannah to personally meet family, friends, and acquaintances.

The days flow by fluidly at times mostly in awkwardness and tension.

The couple loves each other; Joe has assumed his responsibilities.

Gracie, despite declaring her stability is fragile and tormented: it takes little to make her break down in desperate weeping.

Often harsh in her aesthetic judgments of her daughters, she has an unresolved relationship with the eldest son from her first marriage who tells something of her mother's childhood, she denies.

The apparent denial of responsibility makes Gracie a contradictory and restless character who evokes tenderness and anger simultaneously.

Through it all Elisabeth tries to understand, intruding on her identity and overriding her role at times.

Gracie sees in her a chance to bring understanding to what even she did not understand, confused, overwhelmed by what happened, and never recovered from.

The couple is beloved by the local community, and some ask for kindness in dealing with their story: Gracie hunts and bakes cakes for everyone, and Joe devotes himself to insect eggs, chrysalises, and butterflies that he places in cages in the living room of the house.

And if " one moment is worth the other" and "order has its own reward in itself" as the protagonist claims, her lawyer, having defended rapists, con artists and murderers only with his case had made it into the New York Times: the indiscretion and morbidity aroused by a woman seducing a minor is unparalleled.

Elisabeth tries to understand and recounts that her parents are two academics and her mother teaches epistemological relativism i.e., " there are no facts but only interpretations," nothing more pertinent to the indecodability of this family.

To what extent with a film can one tell a story that is indecipherable, full of mystery, the submerged, the removed, the unknown?

The last scene is the most obvious explication of this: intentionally annoying, irritating, irreverent, unequivocally mainstream..

Had there been no Hollywood-style lapses, the film would have exceeded expectations admirably: the pacing and music, however, punctuate its purpose, that of recounting the impossible, the unbelievable, the uncommunicable: to embrace the limits of hermeneutics-that is, the ineffable need to clarify the conditions under which understanding occurs or does not occur.

15-Mar-2024 by Beatrice