I wish survivors of trauma were taken seriously. We don't need to be rescued, but it would be nice to be seen, heard and respected. Unfortunately, the message I got (and the reason I knocked off one star in my rating) was that only the pretty, the petite, the delicate, the quiet, the modest and self effacing will get any attention, that few of them will and that the primary motivation of that attention will be some individual man's urge to protect and to procreate.
The rest of us will be left on our own to negotiate the eternal nightmares. The people around us will think we are crazy. If we are not completely isolated from them, they will harass and torture us for whatever they learn about us (chicken, white rice and apples?) and we may be punished anew for what was never our fault. The solitary confinement, with the corpses manacled to our ankles, is dreary, horrific. Most of us attempt -- and often complete -- suicide.
Our dead children never leave us, never grow up, never live, but we carry them around as even more weight.
The only reason I'm alive is that my suicide would be a terrible memorial to my daughter.
Tim Robbins betrays his liberal, white US guilt in this film as a savior of a woman he can't even understand. Heaven save us from the good intentions of others, with which the road to hell is paved. The writer is a Spanish woman, a professional film maker and not, as far as I can tell, a war survivor.
