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Rating: It gives me a certain personal satisfaction to discover, over time, the real meaning of a work that you already considered a masterpiece in the past, but whose message you had not fully grasped. It's almost like a delicate severed thread that you've lost the end of, which you accidentally manage to find and stubbornly reconnect.
These are the sensations that the umpteenth DVD viewing of this not so recent film (1995) gave me back, produced, directed and interpreted by Clint Eastwood (the photographer "citizen of the world" Robert Kinkade) paired with an intense, as if it needs to be said, Meryl Streep (the housewife with shattered dreams Francesca Johnson).
The characters themselves provide the key to understanding this short but very intense love story, built on the fragile foundations of passion and dissatisfaction, but destined to carve a deep groove in those who tell it (Francesca's children upon reading her will), in those who lived it and in those who, naturally, experience it for the first time on-screen (or relive it, as in my case..).
"Getting old brings the fear of not being known" Francesca pronounces in the letter to her children in which she confesses, posthumously, her extramarital affair with the charming Robert.
The two meet by chance, but their bond is strong from the very first moments spent together, tightened by the grip of time which grants the two only a few days (Francesca's husband and children are out of town). As a man of the world, Robert immediately understands Francesca's dissatisfactions and (not so innocently) feeds them: "many people are afraid of changes; if they saw them as something to rely on, they would feel more at peace".
This "rootless stranger" speaks not only to Francesca but also to himself. Despite his condition as an eternal "wanderer", well defended behind his faithful Nikon, just four days spent with the sensual housewife are enough for him to shake his world and realize that his entire life journey had to lead him there.
At the end of the four days, will the two run away together, or, rationally, will they give up this profound love to relive it only in their interiority? Will time inevitably erase the feelings experienced in those four days? Will Francesca's children accept their mother's last wishes, so incomprehensible before reading the will? This cannot be revealed to those who have not seen the film...
For those who have seen it, it remains a concentrate of emotions for a love story told with style and elegance, whose pinnacle is reached in one of the most intense scenes in the history of cinema, where Francesca, at the end of the film, is forced to choose which path to take at one of life's crossroads...
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