//this is not really a review - happy old year (2019)//

this is just an endeavour to get this film out of my system because otherwise i can't seem to take any more in. possible spoilers ahead. when i added this film to my list, I thought that it was a Chinese film because of the way the protagonist looked. i don't understand whether it is racial biases or something of a biological mechanism where we try to place a person on a particular location so that we may feel more secure about them. nevertheless, this movie just did something that i wasn't really ready for. the netflix description read 'intimate ~ romantic ~ understated'. that concoction of adjectives made me a weave a story of my own in my head - the movie has a romantic plot but not consisting of keeping up appearances for the sake of love but just that the flickering of gazes as another person walks into the room would be enough. but this one was more real than that, much more. let us start with the obvious central theme of the film - the art of letting go. as we start the film, we come to understand jean's desperate need for space and the deliberate measures she wants to undertake so as to conform to the commodification of this art itself. even if she has to just keep whatever is needed, she just can't do that without adhering to an aesthetic that is omnipresent and shouts at us from various corners to take note of it. she has this sort of apathetic leaning where she can just discount nostalgia and emotions and toss things aside. it isn't till her friend pink shows her the cd she gave her as a birthday gift that she even stoops to think about it. though we learn later that her father had left her family and didn't even look back as they lay, shattered to bits, but this piece of information really helps us understand how jean is as a person. sometimes, we might embody something to such an extent that it becomes our second skin and we do not know where we end and they start. i feel such was the condition with jean. the abandonment faced by her made her want to be like her father, not really caring about what others feel, so much so that she did not know where her real self was hiding anymore. but then something stopped her from abandoning it all - a sense of guilt. when she saw that the gift she gave her brother was also going down the trash, her own sense of hurt shattered her pretension of apathy. though she had embodied it well enough, she managed to hide that knowledge from herself, trying to justify whenever that knowledge tried to unleash itself. something that would attract anyone's attention is the way she always she used to wear the same attire, a white shirt along with a skirt. the white shirt signifies the emptiness and apathy of her father, while she herself is an extension of her mother, who doesn't shy away from putting her emotions on the frontline. aim is the culmination of everything she wants to be. he is perfectly content with being emotionally upfront but he can assume the coldness and vain whenever it suits him. i have really missed people having an adult conversation about emotions and being. "accept that you are selfish and move on" more often than not, we are good to people because we wish them to be good to us in return. every emotion of our being wants to be complemented except apathy. we apologise to people not because we want them to have a closure but mainly because we want ourselves to be free of guilt, even if they might have achieved closure somewhere else. that is how we cope. aim's last words we heard said that it is necessary for us to get rid of what is unnecessary at its outset. but is it though? is it always this easy to put a label on people to be necessary or not?