Tabu
Such a great melodrama split in two parts, but I preferred the first one. The second is tinged with colonial disgust in every scene, always there in the background, you can never ignore it.
The first part on the present day follows an old Christian lady, an activist against genocide which also hosts pilgrim kids. The kid she was hosting bailed, preferring to stay with friends, eating sweets and smoking joints all day. She has a failed artist friend who tries to jump out of the friendzone, but the focus is on her neighbour, another old lady.
The first time we meet the neighbour, she is stranded on the casino since she lost all her money and can’t afford the train fare back. Her friend rescues her. She progressively loses her mind, until ending up in the hospital. As she dies, she finally mentions her long lost love, and her friend fetches him, but it’s too late.
He then tell their story, that’s the second part. She was the only son of a rich colonial bossman. Her mother died in childbirth, so she inherited the father’s taste for hunting big game. On her graduation party, she met her husband, who moves his tea plantation there, so her life is basically set. But she meets the protagonist, another aristo dandy, and they slowly get together, eventually in the biblical sense. Too bad she was already pregnant with the child of her husband, their love is forbidden.
The protagonist tries to run away for “work”, but he eventually returns, but their passion remains. As the woman is about to give birth, they elope, mapping out their life in a place where they can be together. But alas, it was not to be. A friend catches up to them and she kill him, then has the child in a local village, which means the husband has time to get her and take him away.
They never meet again, even though they live close by.
I don’t think there any kind of pro-colonial message in any way, for those people it was just a matter of fact they had tons and tons of people catering to their whims and needs, always toiling in the background, earning money to pay for that lavish lifestyle. That matter-of-fact approach continues to the present date, Aurora has a illiterate live-in house slave, and she does not react to her boss calling her slurs and accusing her of being a witch! Of course her boss is not sound of mind by then, but the slavery ethos remains.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.