Revolutionary Road, dir Sam Mendes (2009)
This film depicts a curve, that of a couple confronted with the disillusionment of a life, the loss of their hopes, and their fantasies. Then, suddenly, in a flash, the crazy hope of living the life that they had imagined, in Paris, city of freedom, this life where everything is not an "hopeless emptiness", like the says Frank Wheeler played by the brilliant Leonardo Di caprio. Finally, comes the end of this short moment of dream, of fantasy returning to the surface, before finally plunge under the peaceful water of the lake. Back to this perfect life of a married couple, three children, in a beautiful suburb in the mid-1950s in the United States. The American dream. This film, of a rare intensity, depicts these different stages. These two ideals: the torpor of the norm against the quest for the absolute, the search for an intense life, extra ordinary, these are the words of April Wheeler, interpreted by the divine Kate Winslet. April and Frank embody yet this sublime couple, this couple of outsized beings promised to a great future. Yet the film confronts them with this sad truth: what if they had already reached the horizon of their future? If it was finished? If their life was no more than that: family life, torpor, common job for the father and life of a good mother at home? If that was their end? They live in the Revolutionary Road neighborhood, and yet nothing is revolutionary. They are confronting little by little to the painful descent into hell of the loss of their illusions. A world where the norm is this "hopeless emptiness" and where the madness is embodied by those who say aloud what they think, those who refuse to lower themselves to the normative constraints of society and who are electrocuted for it (the son of their owner). April is a free woman, a woman who vibrates inside, a woman who wants to escape. Her husband seems to have lost his ideals, the norm eventually seduce him, he is no longer the young man who spoke of living intensely and ardently. This magnificent final scene shows it well. April escapes into the forest, she is outside, far from any spatial constraint. He, Franck, is shut up in his house. Far from it and freedom. The window of the house creates overcrowding, enclosing it even more. The standard of the perfect family of the 50s stifles it. The norm of the American dream. He, too, ended up being a prisoner. And there is only she, April, who can not conform to it, never. The one who prefers to join death rather than live the life that we want to impose her. This film is a beautiful lesson on the difficulty of conforming to one's dreams, the difficulty of knowing oneself, the difficulty of believing in what escapes the norm, the difficulty of flying, of being free to escape from the decent framework of society. The difficulty of loving oneself with time, when ideals fly away, when love turns into hatred and happiness into a heavy, shaven vacuum. When they become like everyone else, empty and desperate.
- Lune









