Thanks, Jacobo. I can see how your take on the characters and their respective narrative functions as represented by their archetypes works.
I’d like to focus on the dramatic irony created by the looming specter of Calum’s death. There is the certain knowledge of his death as presented by Old Sophie. On her birthday, she tries to go back in time through her memories in a vain effort to “save” her father. I assume she has gone through this emotional reverie many times in her adult life. But she knows ultimately, she cannot change fate. Calum’s death is a fact.
There is the allusion of death as told through Calum’s story. He goes scuba diving, lying about having done it before, thereby, tempting death. Later, he stalks off into the night and onto the beach plunging into the water. Another time, he stands atop the hotel room balcony guard rails, a precarious balancing act which is an apt metaphor for his own wobbly emotional state. Then there is the private moment where he is wracked with sobs, his depression unleashed in a gusher of tears. And yet, he stays alive. Killing himself while spending a holiday with his daughter … as fragile as he is psychologically, he is committed to trying to leave Sophie with a positive lasting image of a loving father.
And there is the innocence about death as conveyed in Young Sophie’s story. She knows her father is not terribly stable. She reveals she knows he is having money issues. She finds him lying naked on her bed after he had gotten drunk and unintentionally locked her out of the hotel room. She’s probably gotten more of a sense of how vulnerable her father is over the course of the trip, but the prospect of death? I don’t think she has an inkling about that, not the way she says goodbye at the airport … joking with Calum, mugging for the camera. It’s a light-hearted, upbeat farewell – at least on her part – with Calum putting on a good face. But as the movie ends and Calum heads off down the airport tunnel, opening the door to reveal blaring lights of a rave, a fantastical vision of where Calum is headed, I have to think Young Sophie heads home without a thought of her father considering suicide.
Which leads me to a thought: I wonder if in looking back at that final week together with her father, Old Sophie feels a kind of guilt. An inner voice whispering, “Why didn’t I see it? How could I not see it? If I had seen death looming over my father, could I have done something? I should have done something.” So in those desperate fantasy moments at the rave where Old Sophie attempts to pull Calum away from his eventual fate, perhaps she is not only trying to save his life, but also alleviate the guilt she feels for not having saved him in the first place.
Finally, there is the dramatic irony that we, the audience, know where this is all headed. And as the week progresses, day by day, one clue after another that Calum is going to end up dead, there is this growing sense of dread we feel. That feeling extends beyond Fade Out because Calum’s death will happen off-screen. We are left to imagine how he died … when he died … and where he died.
Death is a big theme in this story. Something we can discuss further in Part 4.
