My Best Enemy represents the first movie I’ve ever seen at a film festival because the October Chicago Film Festival is the first such event I have ever attended. I love movies, so as I sit in the dark in anticipation, I wonder why I have never done this before and realize that but for my friend Anita’s connection to film and film folk, I probably never would have. Check one for friends who bring us amazing experiences.
The movie is in German with subtitles. As I said above, I love movies; films, not so much. And for me, subtitles equal film . . . something more than the mere escapism that is my usual fare. . . something I’ll have to think on.
There are a plethora of themes and ideas that grab in My Best Enemy. One is the care we humans must take in not becoming the thing we abhor, that in being freed from oppression, we do not become oppressors ourselves.
Doing to is very satisfying when the one done to richly deserves what is meted out, especially in film, where we sit collectively while still alone somehow in the dark, our participation the passive receipt of what the mama bird has already chewed for us. Simply put, in our theater seats, we tend to go where we are led.
So it is no surprise to me, one striving towards pacifism, that I join with the audience’s sighs and laughter as one character receives what he had just meted out to another, even as a small (too small) part of my brain registers the horror of what has been brought to them both. I do not know or understand why the turned table is too tempting to resist, in film as in life, but I know that it often is.
Perhaps the lesson is this: take care not to define comeuppance as justice, deception as wisdom, the cruelty of reprisal as morally superior to the cruelty which begot it.
No comments:
Post a Comment