Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Atonement

I just watched atonement. Atonement is a tragedy. It is set in England during the war. It ends rather emptily, when the main character, who seeks atonement, tells the audience that she made up the sad story of lovers meeting after tragic, painful, nerve-wracking separation.
Actually, there is no atonement at the end for the character who needs it. In a nutshell, atonement is the story of a teenage girl, Brownie, who has a crush with a male servant. One day, she sees him with her elder sister in an intimate moment and she gets madly jealous. One of her friends is raped and she thinks, or makes herself think that it is the maidservant who did it. The maidservant never did it. His protests of innocence are ignored against Brownies' insistent claims, given he is a servant and she is a daughter of a privileged person. The servant is in love with her older sister, Cecilia, who is equally deeply in love with him. Anyway, the servant goes to jail and Cecilia departs from her family, hurt and feeling betrayed. No one is on Cecilia's side because she is in love with a servant and nobody cares whether Brownie is saying the truth.
At any rate, he is later sent to war from prison. He exchanges letters with Cecilia and their undying love waits for the war to end so that they can be together. But he dies from a disease on the last day after the war has ended and Cecilia also dies when an underground train station id Bombed.
Meanwhile, after growing older and realizing the magnitude of her actions and the unfathomable pain she caused her sister, Brownie spends her entire life racked by guilt by too much of a chicken to go and confess. She even attends a wedding by the rapist she saw that night. She ends up dedicating her last novel to Cecilia and her lover. At this time, she is an old woman whose memories have started failing. Since she could not confess and confession is pointless now because all witnesses have died and the victims of her lies have died, she creates a happy life of fiction for Cecilia and her lover in her last novel.
Very Empty and sad. There is no atonement for Brownie and the creators of the movie end up taking away the only redeeming parts of the movie; the reunion of Cecilia and her lover. The audience is left with nothing to hang on to. Even the lies are taken away.
A

Very Empty and sad. I just watched it. Leg still sore. No running tomorrow.

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