Change Your Image
sophieb-35913
Reviews
Miele (2013)
*spoilers* What it is to live
Like other reviewers have noted, this film explores the subject of euthanasia and under what circumstances it may be perceived as justified. When a person wishes to end their life due to terminal illness, it is something that many can relate to, even if they do not wholly condone the choice to die. When a person suffers from mental illness and wishes to end their life, it tends to be viewed differently, and even at the least reactionary stance, with understandable circumspection. Ultimately though, that is not what i think this movie is about.
When the main character (Irene) is confronted with this individual who wants to end his life due to a persistent loss of interest in life and anhedonia rather than illness, it unsettles and catalyzes her deeply. Her experiences with him, and his ultimate choice to end his life, cause her to examine her own sense of living. Perhaps someone else has commented on it, but if they did, I failed to see it--Irene is clearly depressed, to put it simply, and in spite of what she professes about the meaningfulness of her occupation, the way she lives captures an aimlessness, anonymity, and disengagement with life that is called into question through her experiences with this man. Part of why I feel she responds so strongly to his desire to end his life is because it echoes something in herself. The repeated focus on the death of her mother, which led her to assist terminally ill people in ending their lives, coupled with what is presented of her life--as a loner, who, as Carlo implies, appears to have abandoned her own ambitions to live on the sidelines, as a kind of observer--casts Irene's work with the dying as a kind of cop out. This is not to say that there is something wrong with what she is doing or that it isn't valuable, but her motivations in doing it, and in living as she does, seem like one great avoidance of living her own life. It seems like this all goes back to the death of her mother, which she seems not to have ever moved past. At the conclusion of the film, one gets the sense that through her experiences with Carlo, she has found in herself a desire to embrace life. One gets the sense that she has made the choice to live.