People can explain why they found a film good or bad but all that matters is how you felt and nothing anyone explains will change that.
However, if it helps, trying to be succinct, I found this film beautiful due to the mood and tone and the emotion it expressed and made me feel. For me, the whole film just ached with yearning.
You do specifically mention the end though. Obviously, I found the love story beautiful, emotional and impactful in itself and this has it's ultimate, heartbreaking resolution at the end.
On top of this though, the words Bob says in the flashback at the end and the way this links in in the final scenes added something else too for me.
The flashback comes in fleeting glimpses as though it is Ruth's memory - her remembering the last moments of joy she, Bob and the then unborn Sylvie shared together. That this seems like a memory and that Ruth recalls it now, as she holds the dying Bob is powerful in itself and attests to it's meaning to her. Not only that, but in this memory, Bob envisions a far off future when he and Ruth are old and they see their child returning home after being away. I think it aches all the more because although we have seen who Bob and Ruth are and this never could be, yet we want it: we want the alternate fairytale where this could be. And then juxtaposed as it is with the opposing reality.
To take it further, in the film Bob and Ruth were torn apart just at the moment when they were on the cusp of where Bob would either have had to have become an adult and somehow made this vision a reality for the family or it would all have fallen apart. This never got to happen due to events and Bob remains the child, in a position incapable of ever making this haven now, while Ruth has to grow up (as she already was beginning to see at the start of the film) yet we can't help but also yearn for this alternate world for the pair...
The final lines:
“Ruth: Tell me more about that house.
Bob: I’m not talking to you…
… It’s big. Maybe a farm. And it’s old. It’s older than us. And at the same time though I feel like maybe I built it. There’s no telling. There’s just no telling.”
It's like as well as being Bob creating the idea of his future, he is describing the way he is - he builds myths about himself and Ruth and lifts up their love to some transcendent level all the way through the film. He creates a story for himself which could indeed be as old as time, and at the same time he built it. It spoke to me: something about the power of stories and imagination and fantasy.
The power in the film, for me, is definitely not in the plot, but in the way it conveys mood and emotion and in the fact that it does somehow lift it's characters to a saint-like level, not in a literal way, but in a mythological sense. They're intangible and their story is a poetic fairytale in a sense.
Wow, I did not explain it well. But the thing it it is a hard thing to try to put into words. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be so impactful in my view!?!
Anyway, as I say, a film can't be explained. But if you ever watch it again, if it is the ending in particular, I don't know - did you watch it with the idea of the flashback as being Ruth's memory in mind? I wonder whether that might affect your perception? Not that I suggest you re-watch if you didn't like it. It's OK that we all love different things after all.
Why the film is good is a very general question and hard to answer. If there's a specific thing you feel didn't work it might be easier to discuss? Aaaanyyywaaaaayyy, this post is quite a while ago now but I did a reply!
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