Watch out, spoilers!
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Melodramas are absolutely not the genre that I would be fond of, but here I watched one melodrama - Life Itself, 2018, rather it could be called a drama, and I was quite happy with the result. Directed by Dan Vogelman, who has so far directed only two films (this and the film "Second Chance" with Al Pacino), still known as a producer and screenwriter (in filmography, mostly quite famous cartoons and TV series, some films), shot the story of one family in the form of several separate episodes. I must say that the format, as it seemed to me, was successful, because if he decided to shoot each of these stories separately, it would be an ordinary melodrama, and so the short format of presentation provided us with enough information about these people, but did not have time to get bored, as it sometimes happens in films of this genre. At first, we see the not very successful and filled with various tragedies of the life of one couple in the United States, from which one girl remains, then the life of another couple in Spain, also very difficult and extraordinary, there grows a son. Fate brings these people together and in the end there is a successful family with four children and seven grandchildren (we do not see them, only hear about them), and one of the daughters becomes a writer who, apparently, wrote down and told her readers the whole story. The film starred good actors - Oscar Isaac, Olivia Wilde, Annette Bening, Antonio Banderas and others. Critics tore this film to dust, they have a very low rating, which can not be said about the audience. Perhaps the role played by the fact that the film quite a lot of narrative component, and it is in the form of an oral story. It seems to me that the essence of the film is reflected in the monologue of one of the heroines - Abby (Olivia Wild), who tells her husband Will (Oskar Isaac) the theme of his diploma about the so-called "unreliable storyteller": Any storyteller is unreliable by definition, because whoever tells a story is one thing, and the story is another, so all existing stories come from unreliable storytellers. Theoretically, the narrator could be relied on if his story unfolded before our eyes, but it is clearly impossible, and that means what? It seems that the only reliable storyteller is life itself, but life itself as a storyteller is nowhere more unreliable, because it constantly leads us somewhere wrong, now and then putting us in life situations where it is impossible to understand what will happen next. The thought is not particularly deep, but quite vital.
This is what life itself is.