Till Human Voices Wake Us

reviews- movies
till human voices wake us
- guy pearce as samuel franks
- helena bonham carter as ruby/silvy

so there it was. i caught that movie again on cable. i then remembered that it was what got me piqued about the poem "the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock". the movie was still beautiful, still haunting, still as sad as the first time i saw it, but i understand it a bit better now. i think that's how a love story should be. the sadness was so real that i felt every word of sam. his separation from silvy while they were children changed him. he wanted not to feel, not to be surprised, not to be moved by anything else anymore. everything that made him feel like a human being with a heart and a soul had gone.
because he wanted to be with silvy and when she was gone he wanted to be gone too, even if he was still living and physically present. i imagine myself doing the same thing under the same circumstances. i would try to tuck away the pain as far away as possible knowing that even if i deny it, it is still there and it would never go away until i face it.
another thing i liked about it was, it never turned mushy. i liked the flow of conversations between the two (both as teenagers and as adults) although i was aware of the deep feeling that existed between them, whenever they talked it was relaxed and without the strains of mushiness nor of excess emotion. i can imagine that it would be a nice sort of rapport between a man and a woman. partly the beauty of it might be because their conversations had the same wonder, playfulness, and freshness as the conversations they had when they were younger. in fact it was a continuation of it. their dialogues never outgrew its child-likeness, it was refreshingly honest. they used it to discover who they are.

here's a bit of their talk that i remembered:
"is there a word for that?", silvy asked sam of the moon's reflection on the lake.
"i don't think so", sam replied.
"well there ought to be a word for something as beautiful as that. it's like a moon shadow right?" .... "wodash! there! it has a name now. wodash. it's shadow backwards."

"is it true? what you said about not dreaming?"
"yes"
"but not when you were younger. i think you do dream, you just don't remember when you wake up"

it was also sad about his father, seems that he forgot living also when his wife died. seems to me to be the very subject of eliot's poem.
they (sam and his father) didn't know it but they were more alike in that way than they think.

the end didn't really explain any of the mystery, none of it was plausible or explainable anyway and as a viewer i didn't need cold hard facts. the characters' depth of feeling was enough to cover the bases.
he lost her for the second time but he got his closure finally. and in its way it was liberating.

it was a story sandwiched between these lines:
"Let us go then you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky ...."

..."We have lingered in the chambers of the sea...
till human voices wake us, and we drown."