2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sundance Strikes Again, August 2, 2009
This review is from: The Waiting Room [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - United Kingdom ] (DVD)
I'm going to say that the thing I enjoyed the most was the light in this movie, and then the heavy draped, rich colored, in and outs of the rooms-spaces-places (ok I also liked the music that scored all of it). This sort of dragged you through a time of things in lives feeling heavy, colored by the pain of want, messes, as it moved you into the longings, the twists and turns of several scr*wed up relationships. So basically you have two strangers meeting in a train station. They listen to an older man talk of his life, his love, his meanings found with the one he loves, and they make a "connection." It changed everything in their unrelated real lives....it was just there now in the minds of these two. That's basically the core of the movie. What goes on after they return to their reality is interesting.
And I suppose the premise of the rest is to ask would that be worth all that they might have to shift and change and have happen for them to find out if this is "it." Or perhaps there is an inevitability because they can't live a lie. I'm going to have to think about that. In fact it might well be a modern treatise on the notions of love and "waiting for something."
So each person goes back into their lives and we do too, it's painful- actually -to do that. He's (the guy in the chance meeting) this charming nurse to an elderly patients in an nursing home. In a relationship that seems to be missing love, a girl he can't communicate with, a relationship he's unable to fulfill with a girl that is pressuring for children perhaps as a fix for the void. It feels like a train wreck.
She's(the girl in train station) just left a man, has a child, got into some stupid, stupid post break brief affair in her pain with a next door best friend's husband. So that's like a tumor sitting there. All these grabs when the friend leaves the room by the husband. Ugh. You might want to just dismiss it all, run away, but the filming is interesting, except it is filmed so in and out of the struggle to find a way through this. No one is feeling clean and real. It's distortion, dissatisfaction, struggle. You ask yourself over and over if this angst is worth suffering bad relating. Or for a brief moment I thought, should I do the dishes now?
He tells her he's fallen out of love.( guy in train meeting to his girlfriend). She (girl in train station meeting) tells the friend's husband she's not sheleping around with a married man. And this is also about both of them looking at what they need to be able to all have happier lives. And somehow out of trying to turn it right maybe something starts to break up the mess. Don't worry if you lost track here, who cares.
It's rather interesting to watch, and whoever compared it to Sex and the City is nuts.
It's really about people finding a way trying to do right things, to try to hear their heart, to move lives onward. I could have done without the morning naked b*tt pe*ing shot. It was the "I'm living alone now" being a naked guy thing. I could do without that. It didn't set up the finale for me.
But I did really enjoy the final scenes of the nursing home and the ins and outs of following a few days in their lives. This couple that met in this coincidence are both interestingly made through the directors choices into beings you feel goodness and innately want to support. They have the quality of being able to care. To fumble and make error and yet have in them something that makes him open and read a photo album of a lost patient....it just is utterly a home unlike any facility I know here in America-they care. You warm to this film, these places.
Even Mr. cheat is someone that you are allowed to find goodness in.
Time moves and these two change their lives to be able to find one another again and to make that connection. Chanced in a train station.
Where their hopes are waiting.
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