After watching "Savage's Family", I was very interested in the independent female director of the film, Tamara Jenkins, so I looked for this film "Private Life" that integrates the director's life experience, and it did not disappoint. The film chooses the theme of "infertility", which is not new or even boring, and tells the story of a middle-class Couple in New York who have a difficult road to find a child.
In the film, the hero Richard and the heroine Rachel are a couple over forty years old, living in New York, looking decent, Richard is a small accomplished dramatist, Rachel is a literary writer, published in famous magazines, they seem to have a successful career. But in fact, the apartment they live in is rented, and they have no children until middle age. When they were young, they were busy with their careers, and when they wanted to have a child of their own, they realized that it was too late for them to act, and they tried natural conception without success, so they began the long road of artificial conception.
However, this did not go well, Richard did not have sperm, needed surgery to extract sperm, they spent a lot of money in order to give birth to a child, but at this point, Richard still borrowed ten thousand dollars with his brother for surgery, fortunately the operation was successful and smoothly removed sperm. When they were hopeful about going to the IVF, the doctor told them that Rachel's eggs were "not young" and that the first IVF did not succeed. Doctors advise them to borrow eggs to give birth and choose younger eggs. But it was too hard for Rachel to accept, and she couldn't accept someone else's egg entering her womb, and the two erupted into an argument. But in the end, Rachel compromised and even became more active in finding the right egg donor.
At this time, Richard's brother's stepdaughter, Sadie, came to live in New York, and thus came into their sights, they felt that Satie was not a suitable egg donor, so even though it was a little difficult to say, Richard and Rachel still opened their mouths to Satie to express their desire to borrow eggs. Satie, because of her mother Cynthia, prefers Richard and Rachel, who are uncles and aunts, and she unexpectedly and firmly agrees to it.
So they began another test tube road, and everything seemed to be moving in a good direction. However, things did not go well, Satie's egg activity was not good, in order not to disappoint Richard and Rachel, who were their parents in their hearts, she even took matters into her own hands and secretly increased the dose of follicle-stimulating hormone, but unexpectedly fell ill and went to the hospital. At this point in the film, Richard and Rachel's dream of having a child has finally come to naught.
At this point, Rachel is hard to accept inside, but for Richard, they have paid too much to have a child, and even lost their normal lives, as Richard said in the film, they don't even have a normal intimate life, after the test failed he was disappointed, but more of a relief, finally over.
After the failure of the test tube, their own desire to have a child has completely vanished, but life still has to go on, they finally choose to continue to find a suitable child to adopt, and at the end of the film, they go to the restaurant where they once disappointed, waiting for the child who may belong to them. In any case, they have spent that time full of chaos, anxiety, and disappointment, and whether they can adopt their children in the future, but like the blank space at the end of the film, there is always hope, isn't there?
The film chose fertility as the theme, which was a very heavy, boring, and very private topic, just like the name of the film, "Private Life", which should have been a private and secret life, but just like the film's shooting angle, the life of the hero and heroine was turned into a kind of "public life" that was displayed in the eyes of the public, and there were peeping shots everywhere, such as the picture of the film at the beginning of the film, the scene when Rachel drew blood, and the picture of Satie being spied on by Rachel outside the window.
The film uses this peeping lens to show their disappointed, trivial and even somewhat embarrassing lives under everyone's eyes, which is in stark contrast to the film's name, as if it is a kind of self-deprecation and irony of the director.
The film vividly shows the life of middle-aged people full of disappointment, anxiety and pain, but this kind of mournful life in the film is not very straightforward and repressive, and the director uses a unique humorous expression to dissolve the suffering and weaken the pain brought by the repressed disappointing life. Humor is not only a way of expression, but also an attitude to life, no matter what difficulties we encounter in life, just like the protagonist in the film, making fun in pain, even if there are sometimes disappointments, we still have to dry our tears and continue to move forward.