We see Jeanne in bed with her final client. What is she experiencing during this scene -- an orgasm? Or is she just squirming with the discomfort of having this guy on top of her? It seems important, esepcially considering what she does soon after they're finished.
shareActually, it is day 2 that she has her first orgasm. That is why her continuing days all fall apart. Day 3's start is nothing like day 2's start. She drops things, the coffee doesn't taste right, a lot of things go wrong. Dinner isn't ready on time either.
Jeanne does experience the Big "O". She squirms because it is an unfamiliar interruption in her daily routine. I believe that she stabs him because she needs to get back at the gentleman for "unnerving her to the edge".
Contains spoiler===
She is squirming with the discomfort of having this guy on top of her. She was awakened when her son said he thought of sex, for a woman, as being stabbed with a sword. Once she realized her son's opinion of what she was allowing to happen to her every day while he was at school, she began to fall apart.
She was trying to get the final client to stop and get off of her. She pushed and pushed, but he kept going until he climaxed, then just layed on top of her. She finally gets him off of her, goes to get a knife and stabs him.
This.
shareThis makes a lot more sense than the strange interpretations that she was having an orgasm. She couldn't have possibly looked less interested.
shareit seems to me that she was having an orgasm; and that it was those real feelings that drove her over the edge. She had successfully cut herself off from feeling, and to feel again was something with which she could not deal.
share[deleted]
At first, discomfort, then pleasure. I believe Jeanne's discomfort comes from the involuntary pleasure she is experiencing. She is so immune to feeling throughout most of the film, so completely void of affect, that the orgasm in effect pushes her over the edge. It breaks down the wall of isolation she and society have built around her. What is so wonderful about this film is our awareness that Jeanne is complicit in that isolation. She is never just a victim. Is she symbolically killing herself along with the john? Certainly she is killing her "lifestyle".
shareWell stated, louanz. You've summed up the essence of the film.
She has an orgasm then kills the guy for "making her" do that.
"My name is Paikea Apirana, and I come from a long line of chiefs stretching all the way back to the Whale Rider."
[deleted]