My Cousin Rachel
An update on what seems a very old plot, which remains steadfast on extremely outdated politics. The period piece element is great, and so are the actors.
Some orphan boy was raised by a cousin, another manly man, away from the fair sex. They say explicitly the only bitches allowed in the house were the dogs. No queerness here, seems closer to G.R.O.S.S.
After the boy goes to university, the cousin falls ill and has to leave for better weather, so Florence it is. The former boy remains in the manor, visiting his godfather and his daughter often. Her overtures are rebuffed most enthusiastically, if he even notices them.
Alas, in Florence the elder boy meets another expat, they fall in love, and marry right away. He gets even more ill, and sends a curious letter that speaks of his wife as a disgraceful tyrant, he lives under her yoke, and other ramblings. The godfather thinks of him drunk, but the boy is impressed.
The boy rides to Tuscany posthaste, but finds the house devoid of family members: only a local minder remains, the Rinaldi fellow mentioned in passing. Alas, the elder boy has perished a while back, while her wife has gone away. The Tuscan house is to be let or sold, to engross the considerable estate he amassed.
Dumbfounded by the tragic news, the boy returns to his home to mope. He is now the sole heir, but until his 25th birthday, the tutelage remains with his godfather. Her daughter’s overtures remain steadfast, but polite.
The widow, the titular “cousin” Rachel eventually visits. The boy is extremely pissed at her for murdering his father figure. His rage can barely be contained, but he is soon won over by a motherly figure that treats him with extreme deference, politeness, and magnanimous kindness.
In time, he is absolute won over and more, abandoning all prudence, and growing more and more infatuated with his surrogate mother. She retributes the confidence, but maintains some boundaries; I truly believe a boy, unaccustomed to the female ways, misinterprets the signals and believes their relationship to be romantic.
This leads to a massive amounts of red flags, that turn out to be nothing more than an entire school of red herrings: she spends lavishly in gifts for the locals, to the local church and other like minded enterprises. Money disappears from the accounts, visits in the evening to unknown parts, etc. The boy defends her to the hilt in all these, but the doubt is planted on his mind: is she mere harlot, some trollop that wants their money.
Just before his last day as a minor, he kinda proposes, and they fuck twice, while she winces. His first sex session is incredible, but for her that is banal, or painful even.
The boy’s infatuation leads him to a crazy outcome: asking her to marry him in public, then cutting her in on the full money. In front of his love interest even. What a complete boob he makes from that, in front of the love interest even.
She refuses the wedding, but he will retry once and again. When she is rebuffed, she keeps drawing parallels with older marriages: beatings, choking (not in a kinky way). She appreciates the gifts and the money, but remains at arms length, sort off.
This final humiliation does it, and with extra prodding from everyone, he hates her now. When she wants to die, he sends her through the dangerous path, where she falls and perishes alongside the horse.
As an epilogue, the boy has boys of his own, with the godfather’s daughter, but he is still reeling from provoking and innocent death.
It’s lovely how Rachel just wants to live her life as a widow. She refuses to be bought for money, her pity sex was more of an obligation, responding to what she saw as a desperate plea for instructions about the physical act of love.
She can also be interpreted as being a snake hogging resources.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.