All Of Us Strangers

What’s weird about my reception of this film is that it’s a heartbreakingly sad portrayal of and meditation on loneliness, but I – who weeps in cinemas if someone smiles in a sad way – was tearless throughout. Why? Perhaps because I didn’t realise that it was said portrayal of and meditation on until afterwards… And then it was just too late.

Lots online about what actually was going on. It seems clear that Adam’s initial rejection of Harry led to Harry’s death, and so the whole affair was, like Adam’s meetings with his parents, imagined.

We are all of us strangers, and the film seems to suggest that we remain so because we drive others away. But does the ending suggest that this isn’t actually a problem? Frankie’s The Power of Love, and Adam and Harry’s warm spooning might be telling us that imagination is all we have, and it’s OK.

Samsara

Well, I didn’t actually see all of this, walking into the wrong screen, and getting angrier as what I thought was the start time came and went, and then nipping out quick as the certificate All Of Us Strangers flashed up. Whoops. So I arrived some 30 minutes late.

In the first half – Buddhist monks in Laos – an old woman is helped through her death by prayers and readings from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Then there’s 20 mins of darkness / different coloured screens with music and sounds. And then film about a Muslim family on the coast of Zanzibar in Tanzania. A new goat is born, who then gets lost.

A friend told me last night that the word Samsara refers to the cycle of life, so the goat is the old woman reincarnated. The central section is her soul’s journey between in carnations, through the ‘bardo’ as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I should have realised that… perhaps in a future life I’ll be less obtuse.

[Have now watched the beginning, and, yes, friend was right. There’s mention of a golden deer living behind a waterfall which got killed in a a flood; which foreshadows the goat’s imminent death from flooding at the end of the film.]

How they are related

There’s lots going on in the imaginary space where these two films are mates. Both depict a solitary soul making a journey, and address the nature of death. Both are also, despite appearances, positive (I feel). In Samsara the soul prepares itself for the journey, and is as far as we can tell ready; whereas in Strangers Adam’s soul isn’t in any kind of state of preparation, but just passively experiences. We, likewise, don’t realise what’s happening, or happened, until then end. But at that point we are made to contemplate what Adam’s lonely soul has done, and what – arguably – it has achieved.