Meditative post-apocalypse. Review of the film ”The Light of My Life”
Lying opposite each other in a camping tent in the middle of the night forest, father and daughter get ready for bed. Twelve-year-old Reg is almost into her teens, but she still can't give up a good bedtime story. Father, inventing on the go, begins to tell a story about a fox named Goldie, a fidget that cannot be kept in a fox hole. Her husband Art is an engineer, scientist and inventor. He just created a device that can predict the weather. To test it, Art climbs the highest hill, and the invention sends a terrible signal: a flood is coming, thunder with lightning, endless rains and hurricanes blowing everything from its path. Art immediately begins to look for his Goldie, who, it turns out, has been standing in line for four hours for some huge raft, created by a certain Noah. They will find out that this Noah selects only two opposite-sex representatives of the same species, but here's the trouble: as soon as the turn comes to the foxes, the strong and muscular fox Fang is chosen to accompany the cute Goldie. Art remains on a land condemned to the end of the world ...Approximately the same fate befell the main character of the film "The Light of My Life" performed by Casey Affleck. Several years ago, his beloved wife (Elisabeth Moss) left him due to the outbreak of the global virus, as a result of which almost all women on the planet died out, leaving men alone with themselves and nature in a post-apocalyptic world. The tragedy occurred a couple of months after the birth of a daughter, Anna Elizabeth Shaw, nicknamed Reg (Anna Pnevski), which is why, perhaps, she developed a special immunity to the virus. Now the father has a double responsibility: he has to not only raise his child, but constantly protect Reg from the dangers of a new society devoid of the last traces of civilization, in which man to man is a wolf.  Left alone, Art did not drop his paws, because his quick wits immediately helped him to understand that the ark, where he was not taken, was built in a useless way. Art begins to build his ship, which will be twice the size and three times as strong. Shifting the father's story to the reality of the heroes of the film, a parallel suggests itself: Art's Ark is a cozy world of a father and a girl, in which they have been living for so many years. From the conversations and how the relationship between the two is shown throughout the movie, it's clear that my father did build a solid ship. He raised his daughter with dignity: at the age of 12, she knows what responsibility is, because any negligence can lead to irreparable consequences, she reads a lot and asks smart, adult questions, prompting not only her interlocutor-father to think, but also the viewer. In this, "The Light of My Life" is very much reminiscent of last year's masterpiece of minimalism by Debra Granik "Leave No Trace", which also told about the relationship between father and daughter in the wild conditions of voluntary isolation. However, Affleck's genre cinema is nevertheless closer to John Hillcoat's "Road", because the isolation of the main characters is not voluntary. Father and daughter spend most of the film alone in the forest, thus forming their own space. Hence, the appearance on the horizon of any stranger is a priori perceived as a harsh encroachment on the safety of the main characters, and let a suspicious old man in the forest or an illegible silhouette knocking on the door of a house on the second floor of which the father and daughter temporarily transferred their vacuum to the second floor.  Casey Affleck made an extremely slow, quiet and measured movie. "The Light of My Life" has nothing to do with his first directorial experience - the hooligan hilarious mocumentary "I'm Still Here" about Joaquin Phoenix, who decided to quit his acting career and take up rap. For his in-game debut, Affleck apparently sought inspiration on set from his friend David Lowry, whose Ghost Story has a tempo and muted tone similar to The Light of My Life. In addition, Lowry's longtime composer, Daniel Hart, helped Affleck create a melancholic and ominous music score that, combined with cold, detached nature footage by Adam Arkpoe, helps the film create its own atmospheric landscape of a post-apocalyptic world. From the first shots, it becomes clear that Affleck is the last person interested in the fantastic surroundings of the film. He tries in every possible way to avoid the emotional levers inherent in the chosen genre (for example, you can recall a couple of scenes from the recent "Quiet Place" with the participation of a father and his deaf-mute daughter), creating a chilling suspense exclusively on a subconscious level. In other words, Casey influences the viewer with her directing, making him automatically nervous every time an outsider approaches the vacuum of Reg and her father - even if he smiles, looks friendly, offers food and warm clothes. The script pays a lot of attention to portraying the reverent relationships of the main characters, which is why the well-being of the characters' lives becomes more and more your personal interest as the film progresses.  Quiet conversations together are perhaps the best part of the picture. They set, firstly, a leisurely tone to everything that happens, and secondly, the proper intellectual level. One of the scenes deals with morality and ethics - a topic that takes on new shades in the post-apocalyptic aesthetics. In another scene, the father's difficult monologue follows about his daughter's upcoming puberty and the subsequent changes in her body (Reg already knows about sex, to his father's surprise, from books, but the news of menstruation becomes a revelation for her). Finally, the retelling of the biblical story about Noah at the beginning of the film seems more of a mockery of his father about religion, but closer to the end of the picture, he learns that even in a world completely devoid of all values, faith is the only thing that allows people to remain human. After the father finished his story about the foxes, the daughter notices one important detail: he promised a story about a girl (Goldie), and in the end the story was taken over by a boy (Art). “The Light of My Life” does the same deceptive trick: it seems that this is a movie about a loving father and an exclusively male world, but in fact, from the very beginning it was the story of one little fox. The Topic of Article: Meditative post-apocalypse. Review of the film ”The Light of My Life”. |
