So I finally watched this movie last night and I absolutely loved it, but I was kind of confused about what exactly "We who are of noble blood may not follow the wishes of our hearts" meant. Like, I don't see how exactly that relates to the situation Jane is in (even though that situation is left open to some interpretation). Maybe I haven't thought about it enough, but I feel like I understood the entire film pretty well, just not that line.
shareAt the end of the film, it turns out that the POV character is really in a mental institution, and Jane is a fellow inmate. Part of her delusion is that she is a queen, and as such, cannot marry for love, but must marry to benefit the state.
FWIW, that also sounds like a pretty good "shove off" line when some jerk is trying to hit on you in a bar.
Oh okay I thought it might have some ~deeper meaning~ about the characters and their situations but I guess not
shareNo I don't think so. She was in the institution and they showed several people there doing 'crazy' things...like the woman playing an imaginary piano and another carrying around a doll. So her comments I took just as proof that she was as delusional as everyone else there, just a different delusion. Because if there is a deeper meaning, well then, neither of us got it lol.
shareDouble post; sorry.
share"Part of her delusion is that she is a queen, and as such, cannot marry for love, but must marry to benefit the state."
The word "Königinnen" translates to "Queens". I'm not sure if this is a colloquialism for royalty in general or refers to actual "Queens" per se. Maybe a German speaker could enlighten us further. As for her identifying as a "Queen" being a delusion, I'm not so sure that's how 1920 audiences would have understood the scene. Several monarchies were negated by WWI and its aftermath. There were displaced royals floating around Europe and one of them ending up in a sanitarium is not that far-fetched. Taken from the "Anna Anderson" Wikipedia entry: "[a]lthough communists had killed the entire imperial Romanov family in July 1918, including 17-year-old Grand Duchess Anastasia, for years afterwards communist disinformation fed rumors that members of the Tsar's family had survived. The conflicting rumors about the fate of the family allowed impostors to make spurious claims that they were a surviving Romanov." So her comments might have been feeding into the "what is real vs what is not real" theme of the entire film. Perhaps her actual identity would have seemed ambiguous to 1920's audiences.