I also think Otto is dead at the end, but I take it a step further. I think Otto died on the sled.
My theory is that everything that happened after the sledding accident is in Anna's mind, she being so stubborn she doesn't want to let him go. She imagines him a pilot so their story can come back around to another coincidence, when she sees the story about the plane crashing it breaks the fantasy to think of his death, at that moment she is struck by the bus. At her moment of death her fantasy plays out as she wishes.
Why do I think this, it's tough to say. The whole movie seems to be thoughts of Anna just before she dies, the bus hitting her is one of the first images in the film even though all we experience at first is the thud and the newspapers flying in the air. So everything is an interpreted reality and it can be hard to call anything an objective truth. Nonetheless:
- After the accident, Otto's father is seen in three scenes, in each he is a different person in a different house. I think Anna has lost touch with him after her mother left him, and the different fathers are unconnected because they are only instruments to expressing her feelings about Otto.
- Skiing uphill. What is the point of this if not to symbolize death? Later when she claims to have found Otto in the snow, she declares him alive when all we see is a lifeless lump. Wish fulfillment? Not to mention Otto seems to have survived flying off a cliff into a tree without a scratch.
- How does Otto suddenly become a pilot and get this job flying mail in and out of Finland? Before his mother died, Otto doesn't even mention wanting to fly, now all of a sudden in just four years he has his license and enough flight time to get hired to do tricky solo flying in a potentially dangerous route, not to mention in a foreign country when he doesn't seem to speak Finnish. Perhaps it isn't so, except in Anna's wishing.
Anyway, my thoughts - perhaps like Anna my point of view is not truely the objective reality of what the film or love "means" - perhaps we connect with this beautiful film because we can never understand what a coincidence truely is. We doubt, we dream, we doubt again and dream again. Death is what is forever, but life still goes on.
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