Was it really Sarah at the end?

I think that it was all in Fielding's imagination. But it's only my opinion, i think it could be Sarah too.

It was purposely made ambiguous so that it could be explained in different ways. Basically, there are three possiblities, and we'll never really know which is what "really" happened:

1. Sarah is really alive, and went to see Fielding after evading him numerous times, while at other times, it was Fielding's own hallucination.

2. Fielding hallucinated the whole thing, due to the breakdown caused by the pressure.

3. Sarah is a ghost.


Pick your favorite. I like the first one, especially if you consider one of the deleted scenes, where there is mention of one of the immigrants being of the same exact same height and build as Sarah. My bestfriend believes the Sarah is dead, because she's the only person whose hairstyle and wardrobe hasn't changed.

also at the end, maybe its just me, but he comes out of the experience realizing he has that gift of projection. Of being able to almost physically recreate people. He uses this at the end when reading the previous congressman's letters, to imagine the people has to help, just as he was trying to help Sarah by doing this through out the film but it didn't work cause she was already dead. He can now use this gift to be a great congressman.

Yes, it was a real person, not a ghost at the end. There are many reasons this is so, but another is to consider that one critical scene that was filmed, was deleted, wherein the young Chilean woman and man, who dont speak at the lunch scene as you see it in the finished film, actually DO speak, and she says (not in English) that she was just noticing that her hair, and "Sarah's" hair are the same, and they both are about the same height and same size hands, and they sort of look alike. This scene was deleted from the final film, because it irrevocably removed the ambiguities as to whether "Fielding" imagined her presence at the end, was she in his imagination, or was she real? etc...Clearly, if they left this scene in, they would be implying that it was THIS women who died in the car bombing, and opportunistically, perhaps "Sarah" and some of the church people, decided that since the initial press reports indicated it was "Sarah", (and it wasnt, it was the Chilean woman) why not go with it, and fake her own death? There was political advantages, as well as personal ones in that maneuver. So, indeed, she was real, not a ghost.

Just a thought... This movie hit me really deep.

I once loved and been loved in such a beutiful way that this is the only movie I feel comes close to what I experienced. We used to see love movies (chick flicks, as some insensitives call ALL of them) and not envy anything we saw.
We even had the hard-to-overcome barriers of what "being together" meant, more than in this movie, maybe.

Losing something like that, or letting go of it... for whatever reasons, makes you carry a weight I can not explain. It almost made me lose my sanity, but not in the form of schizophrenia (wich is what would be if Fieding imagined Sarah) but in the form of the deepest depression.

Time has faded a lot of things now, I feel OK. But I still get the feeling that there are some things I will never experience again... even with the woman I end up with.

Although I feel I had something most people never get to experience in a lifetime, I can only have mixed thoughts on wether it is good or bad having it.

I know I made no point (you brainiacs out there :) ), I was just replying to the original poster's "does anyone have any thoughts about this or the movie in general?"

BTW... I am chilean ;)

>But does anyone have any thoughts about this or the movie in general?

I love this movie, and it is one of my all-time favorites because of how much it reminds me of my husband and me. As someone else said, it's got some of the most haunting and moving scenes in a movie... unfortunately it didn't do well in the box office, but I hope it becomes a classic as it deserves.

I have not seen this film, but i would like to see this film. To me this title of this post is a total spoiler. I have refrained from reading the thread because I don't want anymore spoilers. Please be careful when giving titles to threads. I would have preferred the title of this thread to be something like "Who was that at the end?"

The structure of this movie reflects perfectly what Todorov refers to as the "fantastic." The viewer is presented with two equally plausible scenarios which remain in unresolved suspension: 1) the supernatural register in which Sarah appears as a ghost who continues to haunt Fielding as a reminder of both the loss (or lack) he is unable to fill and as a reminder of a moral agency he struggles to reconcile with his own; and 2) the empirically "real" register in which she has simply staged her own death, only to reappear to help him find closure and tell him that his insistence on finding her would be dangerous. The unresolved tension between the real and the supernatural produces a far greater psychological complexity and reminds us that "reality" is, in effect, a combination of fantasy and the real. And for me, the supernatural reading of the film is actually more plausible than the empirical reading, precisely because the film attempts to represent something which is unrepresentable--how the desires of the "subject," to use a psychoanalytic term, are articulated through the "other"; how our desire's are the other's desire, as they are internalized into our own subjectivity.

The figure of the ghost in supernatural stories always signifies some debt that needs to be accounted for, to be given meaning as that part of the past which can find no place in the present. For Fielding, Sarah's death is a traumatic event that he is unable to give meaning to. Her death had no "purpose." Even more importantly, Sarah represents an "ego-ideal" that haunts Fielding's own moral sensibility. That is, Sarah allows Fielding to see himself from the point of view of the idealized other. When Fielding begins to "see" those who've been writing letters to him as individuals, with all their complexity, and identify with them not as constituents or voters or some other object, but as real people with real needs and real pathos, it is then that the abstract "public good" becomes personal. He takes as his own Sarah's compassion and committment to concrete causes. It is only then that her absence is given meaning and she can finally disappear as a spectre who haunts Fielding's moral conscience.

So whether or not she is dead or alive becomes irrelevant once we locate the reality of the film in Fielding's fantasy frame, in his desire. The supernatural and the empirical are reconciled within his fantasy frame, which in fact structures his sense of reality and his relation to the objects of his desire. When Sarah reminds him that it is dangerous for him to keep seeking her, I take it that the danger to which she refers is the danger to Fielding himself. She is, quite literally, that part of himself which remains inaccessible to himself as long as he considers her as a lost object of love, through who's presence his own identity was thought to be incomplete without. And she disappears precisely at the moment at which, paradoxically, she becomes most fully present within himself, as the integral component of his own moral agency. He becomes who he was "meant to be" through Sarah, and Sarah becomes who she was meant to be through Fielding.