At the end, before we see the final shot of mont st Michel, we see Olga running around the dark field, at one point she looks back toward the camera and there are these flashlight effects on her face. She looked straight into this light. There are similar flashlight moments earlier when Rachel McAdams is walking around a dark house.
What is this light? Anyone else notice? Did I miss something about the importance. Was it just symbolic?
If you watch the making of, you'll see the lighting dept actually swinging a light around to light the scene. It's not standard on film sets, but Brad Pitt confirmed having "a single light" on set during the making of TTOL, so I think it's a technique Malick is using lately. Anyway, I think the ending is one of the instances in which the natural light is so low that the single lamp is very visible on the actor's face. Why include this? I like to think there's some connection to Malick's last two films:
She's running around like the emotional climax of The New World, so perhaps she's dead/free in death?
And if so, then she's finally seeing the light a la God as an orb in TTOL.
In one of his sermons Father Quintana says: “Awaken the light, the divine presence which sleeps in each man, each woman….Answer that which is of God, in every woman, every man. Know each other in that love that never changes.”
The Cleaner: “I can feel the warmth of the light, brother. That’s spiritual. I’m feeling more than just natural light, I’m feeling the spiritual light. I can almost touch that light coming right from the sky. Ain’t at all about the sunlight.”
Father Quintana: “There is a love that is like a stream that goes dry when rain no longer feeds it. But there is love like a spring that comes up from the earth. The first is human love, the second is divine love and has its source above.”
Father Quintana: “Love is not only a feeling. Love is a duty. You shall love. Love is a command. And you say: ‘I can’t command my emotions. They come and go like clouds.‘ To that, Christ says: ‘You shall love whether you like it or not.’ You fear your love has died, it perhaps is waiting to be transformed into something higher.”
Marina’s first words: “Newborn. I open my eyes. I melt. Into the eternal night. A spark. I fall into the flame. You brought me out of the shadows. You lifted me from the ground. Brought me back to life.”
At the end we see Marina lifted from the earth, wandering until the divine light finds her. Once again to the Wonder, her love transformed from the erotic to the divine.
Soren Kierkegaard 'Works of Love'(HarperCollins)page 97 “Yet if someone is truly to love his neighbour, it must be kept in mind at all times that his dissimilarity is a disguise…From the beginning of the world, no human being exists or has existed who is the neighbour in the sense that the king is the king, the scholar the scholar, your relative your relative--that is, in the sense of exceptionality or, what amounts to the same thing, in the sense of dissimilarity--not every human being is the neighbour. In being king, beggar, rich man, poor man, male, female, etc., we are not like each other--therein we are indeed different. But in being the neighbour we are all unconditionally like each other. Dissimilarity is temporality’s method of confusing that marks every human being differently, but the neighbour is eternity’s mark--on every human being.”
‘Works of Love’ pages 283 & 284:
“But the true lover never falls away from love; therefore he can never reach the breaking point, for love abides. Yet, in a relationship between two persons can one prevent the break when the other breaks? One would certainly think that one of the two is enough to break the relationship, and if the relationship is broken, the break simply exists. In a certain sense it is so, but just the same, if the lover does not fall away from love, he can prevent the break, he can perform this miracle; for if he perseveres, the break can never really come to be. By abiding (and in this abiding the lover is in compact with the eternal), he maintains superiority over the past; thereby he transforms what is a break in the past and through which a break exists, into a possible relationship in the future. Seen from the angle of the past the break becomes clearer and clearer day by day and year by year; but the lover, who abides, by abiding belongs to the future, the eternal, and from the angle of the future the break is not a break, but rather a possibility. But the powers of the eternal are needed for this, and therefore the lover, who abides, must abide in love; otherwise the past still gets power little by little and thereby the break gradually becomes apparent. O, the powers of the eternal are needed at the decisive moment straightway to transform the past into the future! But it is capable of being this power.”