Friday, September 20, 2013
This film is as sad as a heartless cloud of locusts on a starving village
DAYS OF HEAVEN –
1978
That’s a very sad film about
young people in the USA
of 1916-1918.
A couple, probably not married,
pretending to be brother and sister escape hard work in Chicago and go south to Texas and work on a
farm. The young and isolated parentless farmer falls in love with the woman who
accepts to stay provided her “brother” and the girl presented as her sister who
is travelling with them can stay too.
The ambiguous situation did not
last long and when the next harvest comes the drama come to its natural end in
a cloud of locusts, an accidental fire of the wheat field and the death of the
young farmer duly married to the woman who had managed to fall in love in a way
or another with him but could not choose.
No escape possible in that case
and the funny hunt against buffaloes or rabbits or coyotes becomes a hunt after
a murderer. And justice will not cost one single penny, not even for the rope.
The woman and the girl have to
disappear in a way or another and they do.
That’s a time in America when
being on the road, or railroad, being on the move was part of the life style
but at the same time part of the poverty and the only way for many to escape
poverty, overexploitation, and crowded misery. But then obscurity and lies do
not lead to a clear future and all human relations get exploded in a jiffy. Survival
is then the only objective left and the means are not supposed to matter very
much.
Don’t think this has disappeared.
In our societies there is still 20 to 25% of the population that is under the
level of self-sufficiency, be it in education, in financial means, in hygiene
or health, and they run around trying to survive in cardboard boxes or dealing
and peddling anything they can put their hands on. It is sad indeed but there
is no village to look after these lost souls. Sooner or later it turns
catastrophic for them, or they turn catastrophic for the others with a gun and
a few rounds of bullets. They say it is nothing but insanity. Is it really only
that?
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:04 PM 
