Reviews

This is one my favorite movies. But I had a little different take on it. While agreeing with the many other comments concerning its romance and humor and while not being an admirer of Freud I still thought there was a strong sexuality to the story. We start with a young woman with little life experience married early to a pleasant but unremarkable young man. By the strength of the mother in the story he was probably dominated by the mother. He dies. Despite being born into a rather repressed society and an even more repressed segment of that society she determines to strike out on her own. The question is then is she simply looking for her own living arrangements or are other powerful drives involved? She meets the ghost and while others have been affected by him she is only one who talks to him(other than the daughter which is found out later). So you have this young lonely woman with if written differently could be imagining this masculine rough sea captain with whom she talks of his adventures many of which are rather ribald. She meets a charming man, Sander's character, and the ghost goes away. Ghosts are not good lovers. She then finds out the man is a cad and already married. The movie doesn't speak about her life much after that but it is easy to imagine that having discarded the ghost and it was unlikely there were many suitable mates for her in the area were she lived, disappointed she moves on to middle age. In the movie her adaption to this life seems to be acceptable. Up until this point she could easily imagined the seaman. Then her daughter tells her that she also talked to the captain. This is my favorite point in the movie and it changes the context. So where is the sexuality? For me it was in the music and the sea. Powerful, alive and uncontrolled it surges during different parts of the movie. There is a rawness about it that is not part of apparent settled life and character of Lucy but is the place she, despite her frailty, is attracted to. It is the tension in the story. It's the captain's world outside her rather prim life. Hopefully this isn't too Freudian. It says to me how movie makers of that period could say a lot without being too graphic.