Author's note: The following review was published on November 9th, 2019, in Spanish language. It may contain spoilers.
Source of the image: Amazon
It was an ordinary day in the life of Cecilia, a sweet but clumsy waitress Depression Era New Jersey who strives to get ahead. Monk, her husand, is an unemployed man who plays dice every day and asks her for money to waste it on alcohol and women in exchange for nnot beating her. However, what seem to be one more day soonwould become in an adventure that will leave her with a deep mark inside.
On Friday I went with my little brother to the screening of this movie on the University's Cultural Centre near home. An interesting and fun movie with a moral.
Written and directed by Woody Allen, and starred by Mia Farrow and Jeff Daniels, The Purple Rose of Cairo is a retrospective analysis of human emotions in times of crisis and how the movie theater has somehow helped to forget for a few moments the harsh reality of the outside. The main character, Cecilia, seeks on the movies a refuge, an escape from her reality; she sees in Tom Baxter, the film's character, the ideal man, the man with whom she desires to live her life with.
So much was the force of her yearning to escape that she watches several times the same movie until Baxter, breaking the famous fourth wall, tells her: "My God, you must really love this picture". That single sentence reminded me of myself and the eleven times I went to watch The Mummy movie with my mother in 1999; it was a sentence that my own mother implied to me every time we went to the movie theater to see Brendan Fraser fight against Arnold Vosloo. We loved the movie and Brendan's character, Rick O'Connell ... Well, I loved that character for his self-confidence and bravery.
And I'm sure that Cecilia, through her gestures and her interaction with Tom and Gil Shepherd (the actor who portrays Tom), felt that kind of love and admiration for the same person, even idealizing the real man (Shepherd). A quote that shows her fascination is the talk she has with her sister after watching the film for the first time: " I just met a wonderful new man. He's fictional but you can't have everything".
The sentence is, in a certain way, a subtle wink about the final scene of the movie. A bittersweet but instructive ending, because Allen makes us understand that cinema is a platform to give life to our illusions or to criticize the society around us, and even a way to inspire us, to seize courage to face things and resign ourselves in due time. Cecilia understands very reluctantly when she chooses Gil over Tom; the latter is very perfect, very fictional while Gil is more real, more human.
And she understands it even more when she sits in the seat of the cinema for the last time after having a hard disappointment from Gil. What will Cecilia do after being homeless and unemployed? Perhaps she'll try to dance with Fred Astaire or she may decide to go elsewhere, to fight for her future and for herrself thanks to the courage of Tom Baxter and to that moment of happiness with Gil Shepherd.
