Did I miss something or the significance of the restaurant scene at the end? He sits down in the restaurant with all of the clocks and tells the waiter he is waiting for someone? Why was he there? Was he waiting for someone?
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Good post. There's a good amount of significance to the restaurant and more so to the fact that he moved to Prague, going for a long haul. However, I couldn't decide if he did it out of still being in love with Claire, which he probably was, or if wanted to try and find and confront her or the others, if possible. So I think it was both ideas though he had to know that getting her back with him wasn't going to happen. But love is funny and had him all wrapped up, at least for a while at the movie's end. I think his actions at the end also showed that he had a lot of soul searching to do to come to terms with events and also that he wasn't yet finished in trying to get to some other end game.
"Do you need a bowman!?"
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If we accept the theory (or the explanation) that last ten minutes contain reality from hospital, his memories and finally again reality when he leaves the hospital (cured?) then I can't understand the reason why he decided to go to Prague. As everything, literally everything was fake and constructed as a spider-web, what's the reason to even think about, let alone believe, that Claire has ever been in Prague? All other stories that she told Virgil have been lies, and the story about Prague was supposed to make him understand the origins of her condition/illness (that has never existed in reality), so it had obviosly never happened, and Virgil (and we as well) can't know anything about her real life. She might have visited Prague, however not necessarily, but there is nothing that would make her want to go there again, so how can Virgil (except if not cured and sane at all) think he could meet her there - for love or revenge?
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Clocks are almost always symbolic of, simple enough, time. In this case it is the story of a man who waited too long for taking a chance on love. The whole movie is about living out your romantic life alone, with 'fake' love represented by all the women's portraits, finally allowing himself to take a chance on the real thing because the situation afforded him the control he needed to feel, as he said, he was afraid of women. Robert references the little person by actually telling a story about a 'dwarf', she isn't the real Claire, she counts everything, like the ticking clock in the alligator in 'Peter Pan', it is time we are losing, time to let yourself fall in love, to leave the house, to travel, to try to do the things we fear because the clock is ticking towards death - when we have finally run the clock out and it is too late to engage real life and get out of the safety net we have created and get in the game. He's surrounded by ticking clicks, they are representing that he has run out of time, or that he finally did something before he was out of time or perhaps that he can still have another chance at living before it is all over. Sorry for the poor writing, I just watched the movie and it's really late, half falling asleep, but was trying to get my thoughts down about the significance of the clocks in the end. One of the problems with this pretty good movie was the over simplification of the symbols used, they would even explain the symbols on occasion! What's the point if having them?
shareGreat post! You've helped me to make out what the ending was about.
share@prbessette: wow, this is such a great interpretation! i think you perfectly captured the meaning of this enthralling movie! thank you for writing this before you fell asleep!
shareThe moment I heard the "Night and Day" restaurant name mentioned in that conversation between Claire and Virgil, I knew it would be significant. Immediately, I thought of the great Cole Porter song. So surprised they didn't use the song in the film:
Like the beat, beat, beat of the tom tom
When the jungle shadows fall
Like the tick, tick, tock of the stately clock
As it stands against the wall
Like the drip, drip drip of the rain drops
When the summer showers through
A voice within me keeps repeating
You, you, you
Night and day you are the one
Only you beneath the moon or under the sun
Whether near to me or far it's no matter darling
Where you are
I think of you
Day and night, night and day
Why is it so that this longing for you
Follows where ever I go
In the roaring traffic's boom, in the silence of my lonely room
I think of you
Night and day, day and night
Under the hide of me, there's an oh such a hungry yearning
Inside of me
And this torment wont be through
Till you let me spend my life making love to you
Day and night, night and day
I love Cole Porter, but I think Ennio Morricone's score stands on its own, much like the score in a Hitchcock film. It's an integral part of the film and inserting a "song" in the middle of that score would've upset the mood it set. The score was the one thing that won several awards for the film.
Terriers always smell like warm, buttered toast.
I love Cole Porter, but I think Ennio Morricone's score stands on its own, much like the score in a Hitchcock film. It's an integral part of the film and inserting a "song" in the middle of that score would've upset the mood it set. The score was the one thing in the film that won several awards.
Terriers always smell like warm, buttered toast.
Excellent. Good connection. They should've used that in the movie.
shareI think all the scenes after his assistant visiting him in the institution, including the very end, are flashbacks. He finds out he has been had, but still hold out hope that Claire loves him. He goes nuts after visiting the resturant, where it finally dawns on him that none of it was real.
shareI think all the scenes after his assistant visiting him in the institution, including the very end, are flashbacks. He finds out he has been had, but still hold out hope that Claire loves him. He goes nuts after visiting the resturant, where it finally dawns on him that none of it was real.
I think all the scenes after his assistant visiting him in the institution, including the very end, are flashbacks. He finds out he has been had, but still hold out hope that Claire loves him. He goes nuts after visiting the resturant, where it finally dawns on him that none of it was real.
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This part may be deliberately ambiguous. When I saw him in the traction machine I immediately thought he had a stroke and was working hard to recover. The wheelchair also works for this interpretation. Once he recovers, he goes to Prague and spends perhaps the rest of his life waiting for Claire. Just as poignant as going insane, in my view.
I agree that he was waiting for Claire to return, that it did not matter how long it took he would wait their for her from what she told him about her boyfriend leaving her and she was waiting now she left him and left him waiting. What a great film all around. I don't get people that say it was predictable. I never saw everyone in on it! Great film best in years hands down.
shareAfter speaking with the little lady in the pub, the ruse is revealed.
He finds the tracking device and considers going to the police.
But instead he moves, and then goes to the restaurant. why? Forgeries are discussed at the dinner table, and the auction guy states that every forgery is flawed because a forger cannot help but put a piece of themselves in their work. Billy also questions if love can be forged in another scene.
The conclusion, the love was forged. If the girl was the forger, where did she betray her work, the story about restaurant in Prague. He's there to find her, not necessarily for love.
It's a moment of hope for those rooting for some reconciliation for the auctioneer.
I totally agree, Christine1014!!
shareHe finds the tracking device and considers going to the police.
I agree with this as well. What I noticed is that while he was there alone, he did not wear his gloves. That was significant to me. ?
shareI also did not get the significance of the tracking device. Someone?
shareI also did not get the significance of the tracking device. Someone?
She did not live in the villa all that time. It is also explained in the move, when the villa owner says that she saw them move the furniture in and out three times. When Virgil comes to see the place the second time he points out a broken class in a cabinet, which used to be intact when he saw it the first time. During the revelatory conversation at the bar we realise that the glass was accidentally broken when the furniture was moved out and then back in.
What I don't immediately understand is why the con artists needed to move out and then back in. Why, really?
Virgil first began taking his gloves off after he saw Claire and whenever he was around her, most notably the first night they had dinner together. During the second half of the film, after falling in love, he exposed his hands more often in public and whenever he was talking about her. You see that his love for her and attempts to help her overcome her agoraphobia, opened him up to overcoming his own phobia. I do believe that his hands being exposed in the café was symbolic of how his love for Claire changed him irreversibly, while also reflecting his desperate hope that maybe she was near.
shareYes, and she describes it like someone who has actually been there.
She put a bit of herself in her story.
I just watched this on TV here in Seoul and I agree with bneal123 that the restaurant scene is the last flashback in the film and indeed Oldman currently lives in a sanitarium. The ticking clocks - a visceral reminder of Robert's part in the con - set against the chatter of authentically lively couples - sends him over the edge. When he tells the waiter that he's "waiting for someone" I be!ieve that's the evidence and the place marker for his mind unraveling.
It was mentioned that there was something authentic in every forgery (when speaking of paintings), so he figures the story about Claire feeling safe at the restaurant in Prague might be that authentic thing that she bothered to include throughout her forgery. And, because he's still in love with her, even though she ripped him off, he hopes to see her there some day.
shareThe way I saw it: He lived in the art world. One thing that gets repeated over and over is that if an item has a function then it is not art. When 'Claire' was revelaed to be an actor, in the mind of Virgil she was not the living art piece he was looking for, leaving the other theme touched on in the film: the mechanical. This IMO is why Virgil abandons art at the end and plants himself in that clockwork restaurant.
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