Reflection On Take This Waltz

 

After an exhausting but rewarding day I settled into watching a Netflix disc Take This Waltz a brilliant and disturbing film about the emptiness within each of us humans. Written and directed by Sarah Polley who also helmed Away From Her, another disturbing exploration into a different kind of emptiness, about the pain of losing someone to Alzheimer”s Disease. I had watched that 2005 film because I wanted to see Julie Christie back in work and was awed again by her talent but I was stunned by the direction which used the Canadian cold and snow as a metaphor for the winter inside oneself. Ms. Polley knows how to use women!

After an exhausting but rewarding day I settled into watching a Netflix disc Take This Waltz a brilliant and disturbing film about the emptiness within each of us humans. Written and directed by Sarah Polley who also helmed Away From Her, another disturbing exploration into a different kind of emptiness, about the pain of losing someone to Alzheimer”s Disease. I had watched that 2005 film because I wanted to see Julie Christie back in work and was awed again by her talent but I was stunned by the direction which used the Canadian cold and snow as a metaphor for the winter inside oneself. Ms. Polley knows how to use women!

In this 2011 film which takes as its theme and title from the Leonard Cohen song, some of the lyrics are:

Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz with the clamp on it's jaws
Oh I want you, I want you, I want you
On a chair with a dead magazine
In the cave at the tip of the lily
In some hallways where love's never been
On a bed where the moon has been sweating
In a cry filled with footsteps and sand
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay . . .

And

Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz it's been dying for years
There's an attic where children are playing
Where I've got to lie down with you soon
In a dream of Hungarian lanterns
In the mist of some sweet afternoon
And I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow
All your sheep and your lilies of snow
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay

The movie reflects the hope and illusion that there is someone, a person, place or thing that can fill the void in the core of our being. At its core it is a spiritual struggle as we choose different ways to escape the pit we fear, instead of befriending the emptiness and finding our true self where we meet the infinite. But we are so afraid to go into that space- what the Michelle Williams character Margot labels as that fear of being stranded between connecting flights.

Oh Williams! She of Brokeback Mountain and My Week With Marilyn gives a naked performance- yes her body - but more importantly she offers glimpses into her soul, and its similarity to us makes us feel naked as well; we want to run into the defense of using our rational explanation and offering trite advice to the pained soul. The shower scene has the young naked women in one shot and the older naked women in another and the realization is that we are all part of the same condition as the younger women look in fear and the older women in envy and loss and yet all of that outer stuff fades. It is only inside of ourselves that we meet what truly matters and all the characters are running from that as fast as they can with the use of desire, substances, sarcasms, activity, work- you name it we use it!

The problem with this movie is that it requires viewers to enter in their own voids and maybe that is why it is out in rentals so soon instead of movie theaters. It is too intimate for a crowd- a small group would be better and having prayers before and after honest discussions.

Good clip of Cohen connecting his song to Garcia Lorca