hahaha, I'll watch another one of your picks, it's unfair to decide on just one.
good night
Night Scher! Night Jay!
night, Papaya
Hmm, I just watched this film today. I think I did this whole watching process wrong. So you guys actually watch the film together simultaneously. Whoops! Anyway, this film reminds me of Kelly Link's short fiction, particularly her short story "Lull," which I wrote about on my blog. I can't decide if this film works or not. I had the same feeling when I read the Kelly Link story I mentioned. Essentially, these are three separate stories linked together through motifs. Guy in the present experimenting with cutting-edge rainforest drugs from the tree of life to save his wife's life from brain cancer. The past narrative in Inquisition colonial Spain where a conquistador searches for the Mayan tree of life which occurs in the novel the present man's wife wrote. And the future with a guy floating with that tree towards the Mayan underworld nebula, who occasionally gets sucked into the past through his memories and his wife's ghost. If I were to try to impose some explanation on the narrative: future guy is present guy hundreds of years later whose research in preventing death is so successful using the tree of life that he masters death for long enough to journey to the underworld star nebula where his wife soul is and brings the tree of life to her there long after she is dead. The closer future protag journeys to the nebula, the more his wife's ghost interacts with him, fulfilling her promise from the present narrative frame that she will be with him forever, encouraging him through the memories of the past and his promise to finish the novel, to force him to let go. The past story is the novel she wrote, also paralleling the other two timelines with its tree of life story. By finishing the novel, he is symbolically accepting her death. She will never be back to finish it. So he has to finish. The beginning starts where she finished the novel (with the mayan guardian slashing at him), which is where he continues it at the end. In the finished novel, the conquistador, gives him up his Queen and quest (to save Spain), and drinks from the tree dying and becoming a part of the circle of life like the first human that the wife in the present speaks about. He, too, has given up trying to save the queen and Spain, and just gives in. His future buddha self (which I think is literally his future self) leaves his protective bubble (see . . . it's all symbolic) and gets blown to pieces when the star explodes, finally allowing himself to die, despite keeping himself alive all these years. When the star explodes the dying tree of life is reborn with all the dead souls, and the ghost of his wife picks him off as a newly budded fruit that he hands to his past self. Then he buries the fruit by his wife's grave, symbolizing his acceptance of her death in the present. Since he finally accepts it in the future and gives up trying to save her, his past self accepts too that he can't save her and accepts the death. Or something like that. I'm not sure it really all works. But it was interesting I suppose.
