Not too many other people talking, so I'll start a thread. I thought it was pretty good. It's very well crafted, wonderful to watch and listen to. There are two seemingly-unrelated storylines about love, separated by time and distance, but they are woven together in a strange and interesting way. The ending is a bit open to interpretation, but I don't think that takes away (or adds) anything. It works.
I like the idea of it, and was mostly immersed in the first half, partly out of a curiosity as to where it was all going, but also out of an interest in the Paradis storyline, as well as the rockstar dad (and many sequences were undeniably affecting, usually those where the right soundtrack was cunningly deployed). And then the revelation about 3/4s of the way in initially irritated me, mostly because it was delivered through the device of a freakin' MEDIUM. And the Medium character was taken so seriously, and given far too much screentime to articulate not much about the central female protagonist's mental situation. I was more accepting of it later on when thinking about the movie as a whole, I suppose - - - in theory I'm kind of enchanted by the idea of someone creating another life and a set of characters for her to play out her attempts to exorcise the great love of her life. But ultimately I found the woman herself pretty thin on the ground as a character, screaming silently, crying in her bed, driving around, visiting mediums, wash, rince and repeat. And I have to admit to being a little frustrated by her re-imagining herself as a lower class hairdresser who struggles through life and has only the love of her son to depend on (though in writing this out and thinking more and more about it, I suppose that there is that habit that people sometimes have of imagining themselves in worse situations so as to justify their own self-pity). The increasingly casual reference to the downs syndrome-inflicted children as "mongoloids" was a little nauseating, and while I should probably give the movie a second go through before saying this, it seemed that all the central child soon lost much of his identity as soon as he and the other children slowly morphed into one big symbol for fractured romance, or something. Anyways, while it may not sound like it from this stream-of-consciousness review, I did enjoy chunks of the movie, and I'll read more opinions about it and stew on it some more to see if I can get a better grasp of what the thing was going for.
shareBecause you don't like "freakin' mediums (How many mediums have you gone to?) and can't deal with the subject of reincarnation, you've convinced yourself of a more implausible scenario. Read the director's own synopsis on the IMdb page.
“Truth is truth...and time cannot make that false which was once true” Edward de Vere