He literally urinates on 'art'. It seemed the conflict stemmed from how they faced the pain of their lives; the Jewish generational trauma was either corrected, understood, or experienced through art. The film's thesis was explained via the anecdote relaying the grandmother playing music for the gas chamber victims, and then how the horror in dealing with life passed across generations... the mother gave up music so lives in hell through empty affairs. (She was rather grim, rotted as a consequence of giving up her 'art'.)
Art is the great divine redeemer across this, as in so much of cinema. This opposed to the working class head down, drink and deal that the film seems less interested in. This brings Vida's impulse to read him, to know his pain and see it as the therapy in expression. The creative family are all suffering, there is no solution, and they work it out as culture in art (hence its constant fixation on ritual). The film's collage florid pace and staging made it go by nicely. Vida pursuing medicine as opposite her mother she was hiding within the art and needed grounding, answering why she so loved him.
It made me wonder if they concede it's impossible to know another and art is closer than language. Why it puzzles him is why he's drawn to her with both the stoicism and directness of his family, not in any sense living through abstraction. What she may not have realized is she herself is his artistic escape. That she switched from mother to father pursuing medicine with her mother's death, choosing selflessness for others, rather than selfishness in art... and why the lovers so needed each other: both choosing reality externally but each other internally for their own private creative fulfillment. I think they'll make it within their twin fantasy as outside themselves it will always end with attempting to seek the other.
'Life is not perfect but the children...' as in this correcting symbol of humanity, the blank slate, another expression of this 'ideal.' The ritual of the dual funerals. All the formalities. 'Do you actually care?' Except she needed him to feel a little less to balance and understand her grief. Ellie Kendrick wanting to be a jet pilot is so comically great; the creatives go to the extremes of their imagining. Because it's all or nothing and the imagination conceives the furthest extent. I live through such proclamations. The brother unleashed with his gayness once the mother's repression had lifted brings its symbols home once more.
I found the film truly special, every bit of it reads and the areas of disconnect are the difficulty in knowing another. The Vida performance is so good that I can't imagine it's a performance at all, I can't conceive of this person not being her.
