Watching The Reader and really enjoying. Great fashion all over. The blue shirt, her patterned dress, even boy scout big handkerchiefs with the clip in the front. Do want!
Plaid swimsuits, nice vests, a lovely red apron…. It just doesn’t stop! Where is this movie taking place, anyway? Was only kinda paying attention in the beginning.
The movie just becomes amazing. Whoa, whoa, and whoa. Just got hit in the gut after Hannah’s sentencing, after a series of cold, fast punches as we saw her bullied, isolated, and then trapped by her secret we had long seen coming, right with Michael. I think it’s amazing that, like the Odyssey, our characters make bad decisions out of character traits that we understand and foresee even as we know they are wrong, and we still yearn and empathize for them.
And then he pulls out the Odyssey, so my feeling is confirmed.
The movie has a moving sensitivity for beauty – I mean, it affects me emotionally, but also I mean that beauty is a variable that is deliberately narrated. I feel this strongly when time passes forward in the prison, and Hannah has lost her youthful color. Then, it makes me think about how much brighter and prettier the early scenes were, in the Golden sun at the lake, or the subdued light in Hannah’s apartment.
To speak of beauty is a kind of classical way of talking about art, which seems appropriate in light of the literature reference.
I realize how ashamed Michael is, when he meets Hannah again. How astonishing that the feeling passed from her to him, mirroring something that his professor told him before he made his decision not to help her: “If I can’t help you from making the mistakes that people like I made, then what’s it all for?”
The white, decorated modernity of the survivor’s daughter’s rich apartment is kind of new-worldly environment and it comes after the death of our tragic woman. There is the space of less than half a minute where i wonder if he will tell her Hannah’s secret, but he doesn’t and that’s settled rather quickly. And then the ending moments of the movie wraps it up, with that important matter, because it had to be settled.