With this film, I am unable to write a review without including spoilers, because so many specific details are essential in appreciating it.
This beautiful film, about Romain, a young, successful fashion photographer learning that he has only a few months left to live, was all the more poignant and meaningful due to the man's homosexuality, which generally does not involve the creation and nurturing of children. Parents at least have a physical embodiment of their legacy that obviously continues on. For those who are childless, a completely unique energy is in danger of dying from the earth unless they figure out a way to make some shifts.
After children, the next realm for legacy is probably some other long-living accomplishment, which far fewer people are qualified or able to achieve. In the case of Romain here, he has his art, but it is a shallow, fleeting one, worth only a glance as a page is turned in a magazine or frames flip by on television. It's an artificial, temporary realm of no abiding significance and depth. So, it was almost as if he were just a mayfly, or had never even existed at all, that he had to start over and create himself anew, this time correctly and significantly, starting by rejecting all that currently existed in the WAY that it existed (the old, dying world), and reconfigure it into one with more long-lasting meaning.
With starting over at ground zero came the appearance of and interaction with Romain's childhood self. While we all have thought for a second or two about "what we would do if we learned that we had only a few months left to live," we still think from the mind of our current self and end up shrugging off that question as nearly impossible to answer. Here I felt that the answer was to ask your childhood self, "Did I make any of your dreams come true?", powerfully indicated by the expressions and body language of the child actor (whom I believe deserves immense praise for his performance). This is a technique we all can use whether we have a terminal illness or not, and I believe that we SHOULD, in order to ensure that we don't discover at the end that we have lived a wasted life.
One scene that brought tears to my eyes was during the opportunity of providing his sperm for making a baby for the woman who had the sterile husband, Romain brilliantly drew in and included the husband in the baby-making-love-making. (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, by the way, who, although playing here a small but significant role as the mother-to-be who asks Romain to do her this favor, is quickly becoming my favorite French actress.) Yeah, sure, maybe as a practical matter Romain needed a male in the picture so he could "get it up," but much deeper than that, he was knitting together a human energy of generosity (not selfishness and not egotism) by which the husband could genuinely feel that HE was the true father of this baby that HE generously allowed his wife to have via the agency of Romain's sperm. What a parent leaves with their children is far less the physical cells of their children's bodies, but more their "GIVINGNESS". Parents stopped living just for themselves, but instead live for the nurturing of another.
Homosexuals for so long have complained about being socially configured as mere adjuncts to the "true" lives of heterosexuals, but in casting Romain here as "temporarily a baby-making heterosexual" and thus in THAT his life had meaning (which, if so, I think would be a cop-out in and a failure of the story), this film instead shows that what happened here wasn't the baby-making, but the GIVING that is of essential human significance, and that, in fact, "the human family" cannot and does not exist without it. One's sexual orientation has absolutely nothing to do with whether one can be a GIVER or not and the fact that homosexuality has existed since the beginning of time and will continue to exist shows that it has an essential and abidingly necessary place within the family of humanity.
I had only one disappointment in this film, and that was that I desired (and expected) some ending display of all the photographs that Romain took during his final months, perhaps during the credits, or as a final "Cinema Paradiso" type of scene. In fact, just imagining it brought tears to my eyes, but perhaps that was where the filmmaker considered it to be the most powerful, within the viewer's imagination.
For where the dying artist finally left his true legacy and demonstrated that his life had meaning was in all the ways he expressed his awareness of the qualities of true humanity.
This beautiful film, about Romain, a young, successful fashion photographer learning that he has only a few months left to live, was all the more poignant and meaningful due to the man's homosexuality, which generally does not involve the creation and nurturing of children. Parents at least have a physical embodiment of their legacy that obviously continues on. For those who are childless, a completely unique energy is in danger of dying from the earth unless they figure out a way to make some shifts.
After children, the next realm for legacy is probably some other long-living accomplishment, which far fewer people are qualified or able to achieve. In the case of Romain here, he has his art, but it is a shallow, fleeting one, worth only a glance as a page is turned in a magazine or frames flip by on television. It's an artificial, temporary realm of no abiding significance and depth. So, it was almost as if he were just a mayfly, or had never even existed at all, that he had to start over and create himself anew, this time correctly and significantly, starting by rejecting all that currently existed in the WAY that it existed (the old, dying world), and reconfigure it into one with more long-lasting meaning.
With starting over at ground zero came the appearance of and interaction with Romain's childhood self. While we all have thought for a second or two about "what we would do if we learned that we had only a few months left to live," we still think from the mind of our current self and end up shrugging off that question as nearly impossible to answer. Here I felt that the answer was to ask your childhood self, "Did I make any of your dreams come true?", powerfully indicated by the expressions and body language of the child actor (whom I believe deserves immense praise for his performance). This is a technique we all can use whether we have a terminal illness or not, and I believe that we SHOULD, in order to ensure that we don't discover at the end that we have lived a wasted life.
One scene that brought tears to my eyes was during the opportunity of providing his sperm for making a baby for the woman who had the sterile husband, Romain brilliantly drew in and included the husband in the baby-making-love-making. (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, by the way, who, although playing here a small but significant role as the mother-to-be who asks Romain to do her this favor, is quickly becoming my favorite French actress.) Yeah, sure, maybe as a practical matter Romain needed a male in the picture so he could "get it up," but much deeper than that, he was knitting together a human energy of generosity (not selfishness and not egotism) by which the husband could genuinely feel that HE was the true father of this baby that HE generously allowed his wife to have via the agency of Romain's sperm. What a parent leaves with their children is far less the physical cells of their children's bodies, but more their "GIVINGNESS". Parents stopped living just for themselves, but instead live for the nurturing of another.
Homosexuals for so long have complained about being socially configured as mere adjuncts to the "true" lives of heterosexuals, but in casting Romain here as "temporarily a baby-making heterosexual" and thus in THAT his life had meaning (which, if so, I think would be a cop-out in and a failure of the story), this film instead shows that what happened here wasn't the baby-making, but the GIVING that is of essential human significance, and that, in fact, "the human family" cannot and does not exist without it. One's sexual orientation has absolutely nothing to do with whether one can be a GIVER or not and the fact that homosexuality has existed since the beginning of time and will continue to exist shows that it has an essential and abidingly necessary place within the family of humanity.
I had only one disappointment in this film, and that was that I desired (and expected) some ending display of all the photographs that Romain took during his final months, perhaps during the credits, or as a final "Cinema Paradiso" type of scene. In fact, just imagining it brought tears to my eyes, but perhaps that was where the filmmaker considered it to be the most powerful, within the viewer's imagination.
For where the dying artist finally left his true legacy and demonstrated that his life had meaning was in all the ways he expressed his awareness of the qualities of true humanity.