Silly ending, not what it seems to be
This is a very strange movie, with an especially strange ending. In fact, I would describe the ending as not only anticlimactic, but actually silly.
As the promotion states, "... Best friends Bodil and Isabel, apparently happily married, sneak off for secret affairs ... Bodil gets caught up in her own web of lies."
Sounds like a fairly typical pretext. But there's something really strange in how the film plays this out, that doesn't really add up. Bodil does indeed get caught in her own web of lies. And as we are shown and told pretty much the first scene to the last, Bodil is pathological, both in her dishonesty as well as her indifference to all characters except herself. She waltzes from situation to situation, exhibiting cruelty, indifference, and extreme selfishness at every step, with seemingly hardly a care. She's perhaps intended to be psychopathic, if I'm reading it right.
OK, well enough. We have our villain and the audience is set up for some kind of dramatic resolution. Since Bodil is presented as a person without any personal charm or redeeming qualities, it would seem there are only a limited range of ways to untangle things.
I had mapped out several possible endings that I thought could give an interesting enough ending to possibly justify the meandering 95 minutes (which seemed much longer). But what they actually did, was really quite strange and anticlimactic. The plot becomes increasingly implausible as the movie progresses, with quite a few dangling threads and "just so" events, and ends on a hollow note.
This is pure speculation, but my guess is the film makers had a reasonable plot planned originally, or else they would never have started the project. For some reason, I guess, they decided at the last minute not to use the original ending. This left them stuck having to scramble to do something else, and ended up forcing an unnatural and incoherent ending.
As the promotion states, "... Best friends Bodil and Isabel, apparently happily married, sneak off for secret affairs ... Bodil gets caught up in her own web of lies."
Sounds like a fairly typical pretext. But there's something really strange in how the film plays this out, that doesn't really add up. Bodil does indeed get caught in her own web of lies. And as we are shown and told pretty much the first scene to the last, Bodil is pathological, both in her dishonesty as well as her indifference to all characters except herself. She waltzes from situation to situation, exhibiting cruelty, indifference, and extreme selfishness at every step, with seemingly hardly a care. She's perhaps intended to be psychopathic, if I'm reading it right.
OK, well enough. We have our villain and the audience is set up for some kind of dramatic resolution. Since Bodil is presented as a person without any personal charm or redeeming qualities, it would seem there are only a limited range of ways to untangle things.
I had mapped out several possible endings that I thought could give an interesting enough ending to possibly justify the meandering 95 minutes (which seemed much longer). But what they actually did, was really quite strange and anticlimactic. The plot becomes increasingly implausible as the movie progresses, with quite a few dangling threads and "just so" events, and ends on a hollow note.
This is pure speculation, but my guess is the film makers had a reasonable plot planned originally, or else they would never have started the project. For some reason, I guess, they decided at the last minute not to use the original ending. This left them stuck having to scramble to do something else, and ended up forcing an unnatural and incoherent ending.
- rmmorelli
- May 17, 2023