Fernando Reinaldos | Fin (The End) / 2022

the inability to recognize love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fernando Reinaldos (screenwriter and director) Fin (The End) / 2022 [9 minutes]

 

Spanish-born director Fernando Reinaldos shot his short feature The End in New York as a student in the MFA Film (Screenwriting/Directing) program at Columbia University. Fin, however, needs no translation, and indeed there are no words to this brief and sad representation of two lesbians who have lived their lives together, one of them Rosa (Deidre Lynn) suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

      Her loving caretaker, Carmen (Mary Anisi), suffering from the problems of old age herself, attempts to dress, groom, cook for, and give whatever brief pleasures there might be for her lover of many years. But obviously, it is a losing proposition.

      Similar, in many respects, to Michael Haneke’s 2012 film Amour, Reinaldos, in a brief 9 minutes, demonstrates the decreasingly ability of Rosa to even follow through with the simplest of acts. As Carmen hands her a hairbrush, it takes only a couple of strokes before Rosa drops the brush, not even curious of what her hands might have been doing on the top of her head.

    Carmen, puts out a scrapbook in front of Rosa which contains pictures of the two of them as beautiful young women. She hands it, with a page open, to Rosa who, for a moment or two, seems as if she might be almost recovering a long ago memory, but soon after drops it as well.

      Just as any recognition of her lover has dropped out of her life, so are the last outward remnants of recognition and order. And although Carmen does little more than pick up the treasured scrapbook and put it once more on the table before her now lost lover, we recognize the utter pain and sorrow of having to care, of wanting to care for someone who no longer even recognizes one’s existence.

    As Carmen sleeps, she awakes to a noise in the house. Seeing that Rosa has left the room, she follows the sounds to the kitchen where she sees Rosa, pillbox in hand, stuffing pills into her mouth. Carmen does not even move forward to stop her. We recognize that perhaps Rosa’s most cogent act, given her condition, is to realize that it is time to leave life. Carmen clearly witnesses the horror of the act as also being a strange gesture of love, an attempt to release her from the duties of caring for someone who no longer can even return the recognition of love.

      This was one of my favorite short films of the New York LGBTQ+ film festival NewFest 2023.

 

Los Angeles, October 30, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).