Chapter sixty-five: Plenty

Hello everybody and happy spring! The weather has certainly been nice recently where I live. It's good to get outside, and the sunny weather helps keep me motivated. Rehearsals for my school musical are going well; we learned our first dance routine on Friday. I honestly cannot wait for it. Oh, and there's only a week and a half until my spring break. So, I've got lots to look forward to. (Except the outcome of my March Madness bracket. Ohio State was the team I picked to win it all, so now I'm done for. Basketball entertains me most out of all sports, and the nice thing about it is that by being in pep band and playing for my school's basketball games, I actually know what to watch for.) Anyway, I'm excited about this week's movie, because it's one that I have been saving to watch.

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Plenty is a 1985 movie about a woman, Susan Traheme (Meryl,) whose work during WWII as an English fighter in the French Resistance gives her life the most fulfillment she has ever experienced. At the beginning of the movie, Susan is a working woman involved in a love affair with a soldier (Andre Maranne.) But the film follows her twenty-some years into the future, as she realizes that the new sense of freedom she thought she would have after the war is nonexistent.

After the war, Susan works a political desk job and becomes close friends and roommates with her only other female co-worker, Alice Parks (Tracey Ullman.) She likes the work but is onto her boss eyeing her. Alice is more of a creative mind, wanting to become a novelist, so she quits the job after only a day. Susan follows suit, but not before the job leads her to meet Raymond Brock (Charles Dance.) They have an on-and-off relationship together as Susan experiments with a career in advertising, but eventually, they call it quits by the fault of long-distance. Alice, meanwhile, is spending the time trying to find a love her own, but the only guys she has any remote interest in are the ones who are already married.

At this point in her life, Susan feels stuck, confiding,

"I want to change everything- but I don't know how...You don't understand the figures in my mind!"

She's not as young as Alice, she hasn't felt professionally content since the war, and she wants to start a family but can't - a reality in a long stream of emotions that send her to the psychiatric ward.

Raymond reenters the picture when Alice alerts him of Susan's condition. He proposes to her, and in her vulnerable state, Susan feels obligated to say "yes." The couple leads a very simpleton life in Europe, courtesy of Raymond's profession. It serves as a method of sedation, but Susan is not in the least bit happy there. When Alice stops by for a visit, she's in awe of how her friend is living, not the good kind. Alice is able to get through to Susan by spitting back some of Susan's old affirmations about independent living in her face when the couple has to travel back to England for the funeral of one of Raymond's colleagues Susan isn't leaving London. But, she does leave Raymond.

At a dinner party, Susan tells a story about the war that makes everyone uncomfortable. Later, she goes back into the embassy her husband works for, requesting that he not be posted to such harsh places on her account. It costs Raymond his job, and Susan's mental health spirals out of control. When Raymond finally confronts her about her mental state and the state of their seemingly loveless marriage, she leaves, ending back in the same place where the movie started - bed with the soldier from so many years ago.

"Don't speak,"

she says,

"I want to play by the rules, and the more I know about you, the less fun it is.”

I love this movie because I think the story is important. It's about a flawed woman yearning for happiness but struggling to find it, wanting to do so much, but not knowing exactly how or where to begin. I'd be lying if I said there hasn't been a time or two where I've felt like that.

As always, thank you for the entertainment, Meryl.