Place for dying whales Living people die in time. But the naturalness of death is deceptive, and one cannot work with this thing lightly. Death has a weight that stretches its place in your memory over the years. How old is the morgue worker who meets us in this movie? Eighty, but perhaps a thousand, his care for death stretched his memory to the smallest details of those distant times, when the frivolous “democracy” had not yet settled in this place. He remembers all the words and actions and knows the number of days that have passed in his workplace. He remembers everything except names.
To you regulators, death is as natural as water washing away blood. And to its misunderstood weight, you add the weight of terror, stretching the place of death in people's memories to the depths of the ocean. Grave 997, 998th, 999th. Is it possible to count further? Is there still room in the memory, or will it be filled with madness for the rest of the life of an old woman waiting for her daughter’s body? That's why you invented democracy. Reduce the size of memory to the electoral cycle and the size of eternity to 15 years by abolishing permanent graves. The meaning of your slogans is forgetting: "The past will pass." Just like in the movie where Pablo Larraín told us about trying to forget in two letters: 'NO'.
But the dead are different. The memory of them will not let you forget that you were plaster under the executioner, and will drag you alive to the depths of the archive, where eternity will not be enough for you to read only names that follow in circles after each other, while you seek a way out to the country of the living, you destroyed. And the new country is already known in the sky and in the depths of the sea, and whales come here to die.
The world is gone and I must carry you. The film opens with lines from a Holocaust survivor. A thousand and one graves, the book of this world is finished. A man from the morgue (who has any names in this country?) takes on himself and the old woman, and her daughter, and an unknown girl to give someone peace, and who – a real eternity without cuts. Whale-shaped earrings as a symbol of a new boundless life. Now he is waiting for the first night and the first morning, covered with sea air brought from the eternal land of the living.
8 out of 10
Original
