Did Gil really love Cecilia?
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KindredSouls — 15 years ago(July 28, 2010 03:23 PM)
It's been years since I watched this, but I think there's more than one meaning you can get out of the character's relationships and the ending. I think the ending was Woody saying, reality, for most people, is not satisfying, and that's why they retreat into fantasy. The movie character loved her, but he wasn't "real", however his "love" could have been interpreted as "real".
But since he himself doesn't really exist, does the love exist, or is what the movie character feels just "fantasy" also?
Then you have the flesh and blood man. Maybe he does love her, but his love is grounded in a real man, a real "reality". Meaning it's more complicated and isn't perfect and has flaws. Let's face it, "true" love or not, in reality, we make bad choices, we lose loves, we let people down. We sometimes don't realize what we haveuntil it's gone.
I don't think Gil's choosing his career meant he didn't care for her. I do think his leaving, and her being with neither man in the end, just drives home the point that reality and fantasy can't mix. That fantasy is more pleasing because you can control it, and keep people from leaving you..and in reality, you can't. -
lonevision — 15 years ago(July 30, 2010 08:35 PM)
I've seen some really good answers here, which are gonna help me sum up my thoughts on this topic.
What you're looking at is a girl who escapes the harsh reality of her life by going to movies all the time, an obsession with fantasy. She's stressed and harassed, unsure of herself and possibly depressed. She's married to a cheap, boozing layabout who abuses and uses her without regard for her as a human being. But this wasn't how it'd always been. He was different when they were new together, when he had a job and they were younger and the world had options.
Pictures represent a dream that's there but just out of reach to Cecelia. But then, she made a wish, or maybe a prayer, and it was miraculously granted.
Tom Baxter was the knight in shining armor. He was perfect. And he loved Cecelia perfectly. He proved this in the brothel, for example. But Cecelia also desired a /man/, so-to-speak, someone who could take care of her and she could take care of (without feeling used and alone, in relation to her current husband). But Tom didn't have any money. Maybe Cecelia recognized that Tom could break in the real world. Maybe she saw that he could turn into her useless husband. She was afraid.
Cecelia rejected the perfect dream to be with a man who /looked/ like her perfect dream guy, only real with money. She believed his promises because in the end she was in love with what he represented to her on the movie screen.
Moving on to Gil. He was self-absorbed,and possibly very tricky. Maybe he THOUGHT about keeping Cecelia, whisking her away. But in the end, he recognized that she could only be baggage. He was "a rising star with a promising career" and she was just a poor woman at the end of her youth. He was afraid of keeping her, too.
In my opinion, I think Cecelia was given a gift and she rejected it out of fear. Did Gil really love Cecelia? No, not like Tom Baxter did. He was written to know what love was and to be a gentleman. He fell in love with this sad-faced, doe-eyed girl who stared up at him from her movie seat with longing and need.
But what about Cecelia? Did she really love anyone? I think she was in love with the idea of being in love with/being with Gil. And I think she'd already fallen for Tom, but was afraid to completely love him in the end, so she rejected him.
The ending isn't happy, because it's supposed to represent the real world and Gil, a real man with complex issues. Of COURSE he didn't take Cecelia with him. That kind of thing only happens in the movies. -
Mr_McLaurel — 15 years ago(September 13, 2010 10:58 AM)
Of course he didn't! If he'd loved her he would have taken her with him to Hollywood instead of ditching her! Any other interpretation is total nonsense as far as I'm concerned. What he did is absolutely terrible, saying those things and not really meaning them. Scumbag of the century!
What's the Spanish for drunken bum? -
moviegurl16 — 15 years ago(November 27, 2010 03:05 AM)
I'm fresh off of watching it and I want to punch woody allen in the face! Why would he leave cecilia off with her abusive husband? I know I'm angry and it'll pass but hopefully this board will help me see the "good" in the ending. But yeah, she should've gone with tom.
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TC Fenstermaker — 15 years ago(January 08, 2011 09:08 PM)
I think this "un-hollywood ending" was exactly the point. It showed perfectly how the fantasy of movies differs from reality. In the end I was left wondering if any of it had happened, or if the entire film was just her imagination.
As a reward for your bravery, you will both find permanent homes on adult contemporary radio.
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aniketagg87 — 15 years ago(December 30, 2010 08:21 PM)
I think not. The pensive look that we see him when he's on the plane is not because he loved her but because he's feeling bad at betraying her. The "looking right, looking left" is nonsense. Don't take it literally. Or is that what Quentin Tarantino was talking about when he said film school fills with nonsense in students' mind?
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maneatingbear — 14 years ago(December 08, 2011 01:38 PM)
I agree with most of the posters here that Gil didn't actually love Cecilia and that most of his actions were to get Tom Baxter back on screen and continue his career although also because he was loving the way she was flattering him and his talent. I do believe it's his guilt troubling him in the plane at the end but was sure to pass. Gil's true love was himself, as with Monk whose love is actually only for himself. Having re-watched the film in an already pessimistic mood, my interpretation was that love (and true happiness) only exists in the arts and movies, not in real life.
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Igenlode Wordsmith — 14 years ago(January 18, 2012 07:15 PM)
If Gil, the real man, loved her, why didn't he take her to Hollywood? Nothing, and I mean nothing was stopping him. Imagine the PR mileage he could have gotten out of it! A great way to turn the "bad PR" of the fictional him coming off that screen into good PR: "And this fairy-tale ending never would have happened, folks, if he hadn't had to go to New Jersy to meet his dreamgirla fan, just like you!" In every other scene all he can think of is his career, and he doesn't even take her to Hollywood when he could have gotten a career boost out of it.
An adulterous affair with a married woman and not even a fellow star but a dirt-poor girl from the sticks in 1930s Hollywood? Good PR?
The only way he could possibly have pulled it off would have been if his studio conspired to cover the whole thing up one hint of that in the public press and Gil's good name would have been destroyed. If he'd been Clark Gable he might have got away with it (although even then I imagine he would have been under massive pressure to ditch her), but Gil is characterised as a young actor still on the verge of his first major breakthrough. One false step and his whole future would have been in jeopardy: he was just another replaceable pretty face at that stage in his career.
This was the era when actors had to sign 'morality clauses' in their contracts that stated the whole deal was off if they comitted some indiscretion that sullied their public image
If Woody Allen had wanted to he could probably have come up with some way for the characters to be together he was evidently making a deliberate point in having Gil take the easy and most wounding way out but the actor's agent would certainly not have seen such an affair as a career boost. The absolute reverse.
~~Igenlode, who wanted Cecilia to be happy too
Gather round, lads and lasses, gather round -
intofilm — 14 years ago(February 18, 2012 01:10 PM)
I don't think he was capable of loving anyone, but as much as he is able to be interested in someone else, and not just himself and his career, he invested just that much in her. He was touched by her simple goodness, and flattered by her appreciation of him, but unlike Baxter, who was heroically devoted to her, he wasn't willing to make any kind of sacrifice for her. His betrayal of her in the end is so heart-wrenching that although I love this film and have seen it many times, I can't bear to watch the ending.