What could have been a moral fable supportive of every man and woman engaged in living together turned out to be yet another man-hating movie preaching that women better be girls that fend for themselves.
torment, selfishness and cruelty, is what the plot is drawn out of, a somewhat dark an pitiful perspective on life.
To achieve this, the scenarist needed to carve the male protagonist in the posture of a person that fails to enjoy life, a loser, possessive, reluctant and introvert.
For the first hour you will be introduced to the life of a couple, regularly through the blurry lenses of the female protagonist. The slow pacing of the movie is not a problem there:
before the story even begins, we are given a few clues about some discrete forces in society that tear couples apart: bragging and lust, obsessions and anxiety.
Gina is a blind woman who lives her intimacy in a very solitary yet colorful way. Closed off from sight, every senses place her alone in her environment.
Vulnerable, yet protected and lively, she channels this liveliness into her fantasies and re-immerses herself in her environment through imagination.
As Gina is getting her reparative surgery, we can begin to spot other values that will be driving the plot: disappointment, disillusions, growing expectations, but more than anything: a woman's ascension to power.,
Just as teenage girls grow into womanhood by discovering the power of seduction that they been granted by this society's values, Gina will be living a renewed teenage-hood, in one of those unbalanced ways.
The makeshift inability of her partner to follow in all this excitement can only be explained in one way:
the choice was made to promote extroversion and stigmatize introversion, to promote promiscuity and stigmatize sobriety.
the most unreliable male characters are glorified as consumption products which Gina will follow in avidly.
in contrast, what would be her most reliable partner becomes a distrustful, manipulative and admonished dummy she systematically leaves behind in order to satisfy her desires by herself.
This could have been a remarkable baseline for illustrating how the individual commonly fails to care about the couple,
how people fail at sincerity and intimacy, how they fail at promotion and renunciation, how they focus on profit and aesthetics and forget to build anything deep.
Unfortunately you're about an hour in to the movie, and it is all downhill from there.
Review of All I See Is You
