The World To Come (spoiler)

Yesterday I watched this movie: "The World To Come" (2020). After "Tell it to the Bees" set in 1952 and the more popular "Portrait of a Lady On Fire" set in 1770, I thought lesbians in the 1800s must have been good fun too. So here we are, "The World To Come" set in the 1855. Brief recap of the plot: in the isolated American Northeast, two married women, encounter and fall in love for each other. Deepening: the film is about two women being extremely lonely. Abigail, married to a distracted but caring farmer, finds escape from the misery of her life, writing on her diary (the whole story is narrated by her, subjectively, as she writes on the diary), and Tallie, subjected to the will of a brute.

I was not disappointed by the pattern of the two lovers being one brunette and the other one blonde/ginger. But here the differences between the two go way beyond appearence. Abigail, after her young daughter died one year earlier, has no other mean of escape but literature. She is a good housewife, she takes care of her husband, but she is empty inside. On the contrary, Tallie is rebellious, she refuses to obbey to her husband compelling her to do her chores. When they meet, they create a space where they share their solitude, and them only can access. To underline the alienation they live, very few characters appear in the story, and what it is more interesting is that every time they are supposedly alone, a male figure interrupts. Even when they are in the wood, away from everything and everyone, their peace is interrumpted by a creaking sound that alerts them. In the wood their diversities come to surface with even more clarity. Abigail, mentioning Sheakspeare's play "King Lear" states that prison could be seen in a positive way; when the king and his favourite daughter Cordelia are imprisoned, King Lear says "Let's away in prison, we two alone shall sing like birds in a cage". To which Tallie reacts peplexed for, how can two lovers be free if imprisoned? Unlike Abigail, she can't only dream a life away without trying. She can't fit in that world and accept to live according to the society's expectations. What is also meaningful, is that when they are first intimate, Tallie gets close to Abigail using the excuse of their sexual appetite being satisfied resulting in them being happier housewives. 

Tallie disappears for days, and Abigail finds out she moved miles away because of her husband's jealousy. Accompanied by her husband, Abigail reaches the house where she discovers Tallie is dead (probably poisoned by her husband). Couple of month later, Abigail returns to her life, she imagines Tallie (who had revealed her pregnancy few days earlier) reaching her daughter in heaven, and Tallie appears saying that their imaginations can still be cultivated. 

We would hope Abigail to compromise her obbeying nature and surrender to Tallie and her longing for freedom, but the ending disappoints us: Tallie is the one compromising her rebelliousness, for the life she would want they could only create in an imaginary world, or a world to come, for the world she was to live in, she couldn't fit.