morningmightcomebyaccident: There was a period of a few days where I could not stop thinking about t
morningmightcomebyaccident: There was a period of a few days where I could not stop thinking about this image. And I sorta knew why but I didn’t really know why, so I took the thought to the Discord where discussing it helped clarify why it snagged so powerfully in my brain.I’m the type of person where my anger, like boiling point anger, manifests with tears–and I hate it. I hate it. I hate how I feel like my tears undermine the depths of anger I feel, that the angrier I am, the closer I am to crying, to blubbering, to what feels like projecting incoherence and loss of control, that by crying I’m diminished in my argument.But when Heloise cries in this moment, I feel for her, I feel with her, I feel not her weakness, but her strength and dignity. She’s betrayed, hurt, and angry. She’s so angry throughout this film, at how she’s been robbed of autonomy, that she has no choice or voice, but it’s an anger that up until this point has only truly simmered behind the wall of Heloise’s defenses, so that in this moment there was something so powerful that Heloise is allowed to cry, to express herself in a way that is as genuine and unfettered and arising from depths of emotions that inform her tears as much as it informed her smiles that we (and Marianne) finally got to see. Heloise (and the narrative) is letting us see her. And, you know, Heloise isn’t as demonstrative as Marianne; the dial of her expressiveness isn’t tuned as high as Marianne who laughs more freely, who easily chats with the Comtesse and with Sophie, who will actually cry more wretchedly at a later point. So it felt even more noteworthy to me that Heloise’s tears fall, whereas in this exchange Marianne is actually containing her tears.It’s the way Heloise’s tears are so frank (both in the acting and in the cinematic framing of it), so raw, that Heloise cries without shame (or ulterior motive), she cries because she has to cry because that’s the degree of emotion to which she’s been driven. She cries because she won’t repress her emotions, just as she could not repress the attraction and desire she felt for Marianne. She cries because she feels. There’s such a lack of shame or self-consciousness in the way Heloise wipes away her tear. She’s not hiding from her own feelings or trying to disguise the fact that she’s openly crying, that she’s openly hurt, openly angry, that her voice is breaking and her lips are trembling–she doesn’t look away from Marianne. There’s something powerful in that, too, to not flinch away, for Heloise to confront Marianne with the effects of her words, her abandonment. Heloise’s vulnerability–that she’s allowed to be vulnerable, that she is vulnerable, that she can be hurt–is magnified in how she’s unashamed–and not shamed by the camera.And to feel doesn’t blind Heloise. Not her clarity, not her rationality. And it was something about that, too, how narratives so often want to depict women as irrational or hysterical creatures, they feel too much and they don’t know what they want, so ruled by emotions that they can’t think clearly–but not in this moment, not with Heloise. Heloise’s pain–or her love–don’t ever compromise her rationality. In this moment, interrogating Marianne’s distance and avoidance, Heloise sees perhaps the most clearly and the most directly than she does at any other point in the film. She sees exactly what Marianne is doing. She recognizes exactly how Marianne is trying to find a target, a scapegoat, for all the hopelessness the situation has forced on them. And the relative calm and quiet of their argument with one another–that there’s no shouting–somehow made it both tolerable and worse. That they could say these things to one another–not with hate or malice, but with an anger that could not find the correct targets because the targets were structural forces that keep them trapped–and manage to communicate, yet not find solutions or resolutions…I’d want to cry, too. But I’m not sure I’d let myself cry. Not like Heloise. -- source link