My Review- Eternal Beauty on Prime
My Rating- 8/10
I finally got to catch up with Sally Hawkins latest film "Eternal Beauty" and I wasn't disappointed. Sally Hawkins never disappoints me her sensitivity and empathy with broken human souls is extraordinary.
The character Sally Hawkins plays is Jane who, after being left at the altar, has a breakdown spiralling into a chaotic episode of schizophrenia lasting twenty years .
We see the characters in Jane's life (both real and imagined) through Jane's perspective when she's on her medication and when she's not. This provides some very humorous moments and some very confronting moments. At times the phrase came to my mind "Normal is just a cycle on a washing machine " because at times Jane seems much more sane than her very dysfunctional family.
Jane's distant disturbed mother Vivian played superbly by Penelope Wilton in a role so far removed from her Downton Abbey role of Isobel Merton is centre stage as the family relationships collide.
One of the most humorous Christmas family gathering scenes I've seen in years is when Jane triumphs over her two ugly Sisters (inner not outer ugliness Nicole (Billie Piper) and Lucy ( Rita Bernard-Shaw) and the other when said sisters ask Jane to help them act mental to
fraudulently claim disability benefits.
Things change for Jane when she begins a darkly comic romance with Mike (David Thewlis), a failed musician and fellow lost soul.
'Eternal Beauty' was not the film's original title. At first it was going to be In Her Oils. This is first seen as the title of a picture hanging in the psychiatrist's office. The picture appears several more times, in different locations - Alice's dining room, the doctor's waiting room, etc. The phrase is also spoken by different characters over the course of the film. The phrase ' to be in one's oils' means to be in one's element and is derived from the Welsh expression, 'Yn ei hwyliau', which literally translates (according to Google Translate) as 'in her mood'.
Eternal Beauty beautifully written and directed by Craig Robert's could be very confronting for some people who have members of their family or friends with mental illness.
I'm so glad films like this are made because hopefully audiences can identify and gain empathy with people experiencing acute mental illness and see the Happy , Glad, Mad and Sad side of life through their eyes.
