Women in Love

"Perhaps it is better to die than live mechanically. A life that's repetition of repetition."

Women in Love

This is an amazing movie, full of wonderfully visual symbolic scenes.

The four main characters are two couples (Ursula and Rupert; Gundrun and Gerald) striving to find a meaning to their lives and fighting for power in their relationships. The overall view of love is of something that can ideally bring life but that more often brings death.

To me, it was particularly interesting to watch how sex is portraited as a symbol of death. The three explicit sex scenes we watch in the movie are clearly connected to death. In the first one, the sex scene is suddenly discontinued to show us a young couple that drowned in a lake. The woman seems to hold her lover against his will. In a beautiful and surprising scene change, the drowned couple is replaced in the screen by the couple that was having sex. The man frees himself and the woman starts crying. Later, in the funeral of the drowned couple, Gerald says "She killed him".

Next is the first sex scene between Gerald and Gundrun. Gerald shows up in Gundrun's bedroom and touches her with hands full of mud from his father's fresh grave.

The third scene is extremely violent as at first Gerald seems to be trying to kill Gundrun. Suddenly we realize that he is only having sex with her. This scene foresees Gerald's wish to kill Gundrun and his final death.

Sex is frequently a symbol of maturity, and therefore death, but I had never seen it so clearly shown on a movie.