Anyone who is everyone familiar with relationships, companionships, matehood, togetherness, whatever it may be labeled, have fallen into the fear of committing, mostly due to two causes:
The first, a damp and solid truth one only sees when it is pulled out of the orgy of excuses at the ready; It is not our fear of loving someone, it is the fear that the one you love may not love you back
The second, almost exclusively cornered on the market by perpetual half-steppers and scattered brained impetuous sprinters; The fear of loving resulting from an adjoining, festering thought, of the grass being greener on the other side, convincing yourself that you are settling and by settling, you are removal yourself from a market which may offer something more robust.
All of these lessons flooded and overwhelmed all at once when first I saw the film [The Bridges of Madison County]. It is a film that cruises at a perfect pace, developing sound and unmistakably, as if ensuring that you caught sight of a glimpse meant to be missed or dismissed as a rogue reflection bouncing off a plasma screen.
It is not a story of a man and a woman who falls in love, no, that is incidental, it is the story of a woman, resigned to a housewife and a mother to two growing children, who, as the film advances, one could safely surmise her marriage to this ordinary yet dependable man wasn’t in fact sealed by love but rather her finding an opportunity to escape the rubbles and lingering dangers still roaming every region of post-war Italy. Settling to a man she didn’t love or loved in a way for his tending to his role as a fat her to her children, was the exacted cost she paid, dispensing with all those dreamy and sonnets written, published and circulated for hundreds of years, a great love
Complacent in her settled life as frontier mother, in the rural expanse of Iowa, in parts even unknown by people who may have spent their entire life in the state, she is caught in a rude waylay, proving once more, as it usually does, that blind side hits are much harder because you never see them coming.
A man pulls up not too long after her husband and children depart for an affair that will keep them absent for an entire weekend. A long time homemaker use to the vigors of caring for a man and two children makes it difficult for her when there was suddenly nothing to be done. With endeavor, she begins to wind herself down, take advantage of the seldom silence in the house, without numerous chores to be done, having to build up the energy after long days of hustling to lie on her back while with her husband on top of her, always thinking “When will it be over?”
It is safe to say she is the epitome of what many stay-at-home mothers endure, today as then, a drastic loss of self, the unspoken surrender of ambitions they once held dear to accomplish, arriving at the conclusion that if there is any energy to be found to rebel against such servitude, it is best given to the effort it’ll take to care for her family; she can’t run the risk of a battle that may prove to be too lengthy for her to sustain. Francesca resigned long ago to no longer be the young vibrant independent striver, selflessly factoring in that she was no longer the only one to be of concern, her children would bare witness to what would soon become an unstable, unhappy home, and it would be her cross to bare if they were to grow into adults themselves, still without the belief of a happy family, lost in childhood.
The daylight was still alert so while she basked in the sun, a truck was coming towards her house on the driveway. Robert Kincaid emerge, lost, seeking directions and Francesca, troubled by the joy of having unfamiliar company with an outsider, rarely seen in those parts, invited him in for a drink and refreshments. What would ensure would be the result of Francesca’s curiosity coupled with an aloneness well aged, indulging in a conversation with Robert, a photographer for a major magazine, a worldly, educated, mysterious artist who had come to the area to photographer the covered bridges, a group of a few last remaining in the country.
Here is this man who has come to a place in the middle of nowhere and spun gold around bridges Francesca has seen time and again for years, never before aware of how significant they were, how they were aging relics of a practice of architecture whose innovators had long been placed in the ground.
Robert invites Francesca along on his shoot and still in awe after he had actually been to the town she was born in back in Italy, she found she couldn’t tear herself aware from him, more vulnerable than she ever believed, again, reiterating the strong hypothesis of her having settled for comfort and to escape Italy.
Perhaps women who are married would quickly despise Francesca’s behavior and dismiss any attempt of explanations given to ease the scorch of judgement, but when it comes to love, especially newly formed love, which is by far the time love is at its strongest and most determined, consumes all, temporarily erasing all else surviving factors, or in the case of Francesca, after having gone to be with is the most interesting, gentle, calm and adventurous man she’s ever met, the question of whereabouts arise and the possibilities are exhumed, deep from beneath the oppression of self sacrifice, still in tact as the day they were buried so long ago.
What follows their night of passion and infidelity is the proposal of Francesca leaving Madison county, where taking a chance of being happy would be so close to her grasp. Entertaining the idea of leaving her family behind, Francesca falls into being torn apart, to stay for the sake of her family or to leave with a man she knew she loved more than she ever may ever love her husband.
In the end, Francesca decides she would remain home, with a family she felt obligated to take care of, letting Robert leave, regretting for the rest of her life having been cornered by her decision, and her would never see Robert Kincaid for the rest of her life, still declaring that she had never loved a man as much as she did Robert
By Dontrell Lovet’t
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