mess

“One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough.” […] “There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.”

Katya dies. Katya lives. Katya fakes her own death, which is a metaphor for dying, even if she survives. Note that we never see Katya after her fake death is reported to Goncharov, because the movie is not interested in Katya’s survival; it is interested in her loss. Note that it can be argued this lacuna is of no particular significance, given that we never see her before that, either, because the movie doesn’t exist. Note that Goncharov never sees her, really: note how often in their scenes his eyes are somewhere else, how rarely their conversations fall into the familiar visual rhythm of shot/reverse shot (compare with his exchanges with Andrey, particularly just before the scene on the bridge). Note how often this has been true, on screen and off it: that a husband never really sees his wife. Note how often the effect of cinema as an art form has been to document that men never really see women. They see their mothers, they see sex, they see their desires and their failures, their potential and their shame, their delusions of grandeur and their grubby biographies laid out side by side. They see the airbrushed ad campaign and the unsmooth reality of flesh laid out side by side and they look at the lie and say That one, I want that one, and then they win an Oscar for it. They see themselves. Narcissus at the pond. (There is a story from an ancient land, a story of a love more passionate and powerful than the human desire to survive: A girl loved a boy. A boy loved himself. He couldn’t understand that she was always trying to talk to him; she couldn’t understand that he would never try to speak to her. Their love killed them both.) Note that moment at the start of the bridge scene, before everything falls apart, where we see their reflections in the water, just long enough to note that his eyes are on his wavering image, and so are hers. Note that Goncharov doesn’t see her, because he doesn’t see women as people. Note that Goncharov doesn’t see her because he’s not in the movie because the movie doesn’t exist. Note that actually it’s Goncharov and Andrey on the bridge, because Katya by that point is dead.