我们讲述的故事

“Love’s short, forgetting’s long,” says Neruda. As a documentary that structures from the “stories” (plural as in different perspectives and reactions towards what happened, not necessarily what actually happened), in terms of “stories we tell”, to “telling”, that incorporates all that contradictory yet common feelings and words that have to be expressed towards the absent Daine, the climax of Sarah’s biological father, and the meaning of their own lives from the story. I notice how the fact of the unreliability of our memory plays an essential role in interviews among basically all these people attached to the story, even Sarah, the director behind the scenes. The interview question on the day of Daine’s funeral comes in early in the film, and the siblings talk about how being in the entertainment industry makes her funeral seem like a surreal production, which is ironic. After going through all the suspense and reveal of discovering the true biological father of Sarah, almost composing the “truth”, the film pauses and Sarah questions the deeper purpose of her exposing this story and the motive behind finding the truth. Is there an actual truth? Does it matter? As an audience, I stop as well. Till the end, Sarah finally asks that question, what everyone feels, instead of on the day of Daine’s funeral, but on the day she dies and they all get a chance to talk last words to her. That’s the part when they all start sobbing and getting stuck in a sentimental emotion of recalling. The word “why” does not exist in that fly’s life, sitting on Micheal’s window to accompany him. But this does not make any less of the meaningness of that fly’s life.

In 2023, in recounting the story in a podcast Sarah said her version was absent in the film, and she only wrote it out after her father has passed away in 2018, so he would not have to bear the hard feelings of the self exposure of his daughter.

Amidst watching the film where her mom’s passing at the early age of 54 was shown, it struck to me that if you stay less self aware and roll along with your instincts and longings, then in a sense you are propelled by the unfinished issues from earlier experience of your life. You might feel you are free, at least you made your choices, but in a way you are destined — of course we can say that applies to all of us in the sense of mysticism and determism — but this is a bit different as if you were willing to take a longer view into your past and relinquish your impulse to be elsewhere for a while, then you might be able to arrive at a truly free place, a place of some people call existential angst, while more agreeable people will say now you can rely on your body feelings and intuition: allow curiosity and joy be your guide, you are for sure suiting for a better state of mind.

Her dad didn’t look like it, i mean his face seems to be a mismatch to his words and narrative.

Recently reading biographies of people and seeing interviews of liked people, there seems to be a definitive distinction between two state of being, one that acted with impulse, and one that acted upon reflection — a lot times a major grapple in a critical stage of life, almost forced by dissatisfaction of miseries and misfortunes took place before, and after a long struggle filled bumps and lumps, suffering and hearbreaks, you live on the solace of a meta viewpoint of a journey map, implying a hope that this sadness has inevitably an end of some kind. Gradually you slide, perhaps it’s just you are tired, to a numbing and/but settling slope that land you to a sail on another aether of your life.