Beloved (1998)

It’s good to be wrong. A scruffy DVD with the names Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey didn’t seem to promise much, I mean: Oprah. Contrary to my prejudiced conception, Beloved was not a bad film at al. The film is based on a novel by Toni Morrison. What was striking about it was how the trauma of slavery was interpreted. This film wasn’t at all the sugarcoated and sentimental tale I expected it to be. Beloved is not the typical Hollywood adaptation of a novel: it is too bold for that, the solutions are too independent (I think I can say this without having read the book). Instead of the regular type of condensed and well-behaved Wisdom, I was confronted with a harsh, sometimes idiosyncratic, story about wounds that will not heal, ghosts that will always reappear, and the open-ended character of history. The main character of the film is Sethe, a woman who fled from slave-owners. She now lives with her daughter Denver in a house in which a ghost seems to live. One day, an old acquaintance, Paul D, comes to visit. They have not seen each other for many years. Paul and Sethe become lovers. Another visitor arrives, a girl who seems to be in a trance-like condition. The girl stays with them and somehow she seems to know all about them. Even though there were some things in this film that I did not understand, I appreciated its means of storytelling, the contrast between a past remembered primarily through emotions and the way emotions from the past and of the past are ever-present in the present.