I’m inspired to write after watching the movie, “The Reader”. I cried my eyes out for a large portion of the movie. It touched me to say the least. It was moving. It was full of energy, sexuality, sadness, misunderstanding and most importantly love and desire. The movie was about soulmates from different ages. Two people that could have lived a lifetime together had their ages not been so extreme and their lives so different. It was a story of youth and experience intertwined to make an epic love story that occurred over a few short months yet spanned a lifetime. The innocence of youth was touched by a hidden world of pain and suffering abruptly uncovered by time. The curiosity of sexual energy that exploded during his young teen years captures him and holds him as a prisoner for the rest of his life. He was frozen in time, unable to move forward mourning the loss of his love. Their lives were touched by one another. Her past, their love affair, and his realization, entrenched emotions so deep it could flood the soul of every man on earth. It was a literary dream, a movie filled with passion and literature. The Odyssey, his beautiful readings. His words came to life like dancing butterflies floating above the pages of the books he read to her. She was mesmerized by his reading and his love of literature. This movie taught me many lessons about life. It taught me to understand the relationship between love, lust and sexuality. The characters play such different roles. He taught me about innocence and falling in love. She taught me about sexuality and secrets and how they destroy lives. I wonder how she felt about her painful secret? She was mysterious in nature and very difficult to read. She was cold but yet extremely caring. She was afraid get extremely angry. She was confident and bold and so seasoned in life that she was afraid to admit her inability to read. She was embarrassed but yet willing to give her own life for the sake of that embarrassment. He loved her with every fiber of his being. From his first glance at her thigh as she put on her hose until his dying breath. His love for her consumed his life. He filled his days with thoughts of that summer. He eventually married another woman and had a child but later divorced because he knew he had married the wrong woman. He longed for the love of his life but he knew he could never have her. A twist of fate brings their path together again only to watch his true love reveal the story of her life previous to his affair with her. He was a law student watching a trial of a concentration camp guard now being tried for the murder of hundreds of innocent women and children. It turns out that his love was a cold-blooded murderer. Much different from the woman he loved and adored as a boy. The past haunts all of us to a certain extent, however most of the time it’s better to leave the past in the past. Betrayal also plays and important part in this movie. The innocence of first love was betrayed by her tainted past. Finally karma twists and weaves itself into the flesh of this movie, betrayal bites her back and she is left a prisoner in her own world, empty and alone just as she had left him during his youth.
Robin S. Ivany 