Uma Vida à Espera
Slow moving drama that flares up in the last minutes. Bait-and-switch until the very last second.
A guy leaves his house and takes the mailbox. He takes residence in the local park bench, trying to write a letter to his son everyday.
In between a look at the practicalities of living in the streets, we also get a smaller look at some of his neighbours and partners: a little dog, abandoned like the protagonist; an older Doc who burned out and is now searching for the meaning of life in the bottom of a bottle; a lonesome shopkeeper who lost her child and her husband blames for the tragedy; and a young doctor passing by, but always stopping.
This state of affairs goes on for years, keeping the same routine over and over and over again. The shopkeeper’s husband returns, but our protagonist gives up on her to remain at his post.
After so many years, always dragging that mailbox around, he eventually dies, still claiming he sees his son everyday but receiving no letters.
At his funeral, after the regulars go away, his actual son shows up to his grave, and posts the response he had ready for all this years: “you are forgiven now”.
Turns out he was the mailman that always passed in the background, but they never talked. There are also some more flashbacks during the film to clearly show our protagonist sexually abused his kid, which ran away from home. His wife killed herself after learning about this, which lead our protagonist to try and fail to patch thing up. Some injuries never heal…
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.