Die My Love

Ambiguity hovers over everything, which is this director’s strong suit, but it seems to me that the intention behind this film concerns madness less than it does one woman’s refusal to accept roles she feels are being thrust upon her by society or those around her, and that, if what she suffers from is a form of madness, it is one with which we are meant to sympathise, or at least find understandable as a form of wild and defiant individuality against the forces of oppression and repression. It might be, we should think, that her intransigence exceeds certain necessary limits, but, the film seems to be saying, we ought still to be capable of appreciating it as a form of commitment to “going all the way” which we are fortunate to be able to observe from the safe distance of the movie theatre – that is, from the noble sanctuary that is the house of “art”.

Against this intention, however, if that’s what it is, I can’t help but feel that this idea of refusal of conformity at any cost is an old one, not really so radical, and that it misses the real questions with which we are confronted today, including the real questions of madness. The other characters all have their failings, and perhaps they are more conventional than she is, and are therefore less “interesting”, but what really is it that we are supposed to find admirable in the protagonist’s set of symptoms or behaviours? Perhaps we could read the protagonist’s constant wish for more sex as a yearning for connection, a dream of some more genuine form of coexistence, but that is a very generous interpretation of her desire, which, apart from a few brief moments, seems completely divorced from all other real and existing human beings. Even though I have never read the work of Ariana Harwicz, the Jewish Argentinian novelist whose book formed the basis of this film, somehow I have the feeling than when it comes to the prison of motherhood, I’m more of a Sayaka Murata kind of a guy.