Linsey Duncan"Lydia" an exploration of female Identity
December 18th 2008 18:15
The Second film was the exploration of a womans character through reminisance of her and the men who had loved her throughout her life. It starts at the end and the plot is told in flashbacks which is a good way of showing the subjectivity of the memory by revealing how the different characters saw the same memory in an a different way at points. She never ends up marrying and the Conservative code is strongly reins in the plot. She spends forty years paying for sleeping with the love of her life before she had married him. He runs of the next week and at the end of her life when she meets him again does not remember her while her life has been haunted and overshadowed waiting for him to return.
This seems not an all a tale of women's liberation when seen in this light. Her not marrying is degraded by the suggestion she has wasted the true love she could have had with one of the men as she desires all or nothing and having tasted what she feels was that love prefers nothing to settling for less than all. This true love is revealed a sham and there is the scent of tragedy all over her inability to take hold of the true lasting love that could have been.
Yet in another light perhaps it could suggest a freedom in her ending up a spinster. She tells them all they never knew her. Each man loved something different about her and she was a different person to each. By never committing to any of them she is never pinned down to their one concept of who she is and remains multifaceted, whole and independant by herself. The overtones suggesting there should be loss felt for the years spent by herself are not altogether blinding to the possibility that her life was just as fulfilled achieving what she has in that time by herself being a woman with money who developing an awareness and compassion for poor blind children starts up an institute for the blind and opens an orphanage near the end of her life with her name on it. She leaves a legacy. The men are her support yet she is the one standing alone actually making things happen. The first movie also turned the woman as support stereotype over on its head in its final moments with the woman making the speech and saving the day and then being embraced by her supportive husband who has left everything up to her and just arrived in time to give her a comforting hug.
Both films close with the scene of the woman and the man that loves them in profile. But the second film especially although couched in the values of its time manages to paint a portrait of a womans life that contains an independant spirit as represented by her love of the sea and vibrant nature. She is not defined by the mens memory of her as all their memories weave together. It seems as though the idea of love is when too people truly see and know each other. But it is complicated by the fact that by falling in love it is open to interpretation whether a person is only truly themselves with that person or becomes someone else with that person. She thinks she was only truly herself in the moments of her wild passionate relationship with the captain that abandons her and later doesn't recognise her. But she does in the final moments acknowledge that none of the men she knew really loved her. Most loved who they imagined her to be and her precious captain only loved himself. The truest picture of her is thus the part that stands alone to always be remembered in the letters of her name on the sign above the orphanage she has created as her legacy.
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